Changes in habitat suitability for wintering dabbling ducks during dry conditions in the Central Valley of California

In arid and Mediterranean regions, landscape-scale wetland conservation requires understanding how wildlife responds to dynamic freshwater availability and human actions to enhance wetland habitat. Taking advantage of the Landsat satellite time series (2007–2016) and structured and community science bird survey data, we built species distribution models to describe how three duck species – Northern Pintail (Anas acuta), Green-winged Teal (A. crecca), and Northern Shoveler (A. clypeata) – respond to freshwater supply and food resources on different flooded land cover types in the Central Valley of California. Specifically, our models were designed to compare duck habitat suitability between the wettest to driest conditions in each month from September through April. Using abundance-weighted boosted regression trees, we created three sets of species occurrence models based on different covariates: (i) near real-time (hereafter “real-time”) covariates in which duck observations were matche...