Community-science reveals delayed fall migration of waterfowl and spatiotemporal effects of a changing climate

Climate change has well-documented, yet variable, influences on the annual movements of migratory birds. The effects of climate change on fall migration remains understudied compared to spring, but appears to be less consistent among species, regions, and years. Changes in the pattern and timing of waterfowl migration in particular may result in cascading effects on ecosystem function, and socioeconomic and cultural outcomes. We investigated changes in the migration of 15 waterfowl species along a major flyway corridor of continental importance in northeastern North America using 43 years of community-science data. We built spatially- and temporally-explicit hierarchical generative additive models for each species and demonstrated that climate, specifically the interaction between minimum temperature and precipitation, significantly influences migration phenology for most species. Certain species’ migratory movements responded to specific temperature thresholds (climate migrants) and ot..., Fall migration observation data            
Étude des populations d'oiseaux du Québec (ÉPOQ) is a database of bird observations managed by QuébecOiseaux (Larivée, 2001). It is North America’s longest-running, and prior to eBird, largest checklist program. Data are collected according to guidelines designed to maximize scientific rigor (Dunn et al., 1996). ÉPOQ consists of more than six million observations that have been collected since the early 1900s by birders from all around Québec, as well as many retro-active contributions from other published works that date back to the 1700s. Although both professional and amateur birders are able to submit their observations to ÉPOQ, 90% of the data is collected by 10% of the observers, called ‘expert observers’ (Francoeur, 2012). ÉPOQ is an invaluable source of historical bird abundance information in Québec, particularly for data compiled from the late 1960s to 2012. After 2012, the growing popularity of eBird largely replaced ÉPOQ, and the ..., , # Community-science reveals delayed fall migration of waterfowl and spatiotemporal effects of a changing climate

Abstract

Climate change has well-documented, yet variable, influences on the annual movements of migratory birds. The effects of climate change on fall migration remains understudied compared to spring, but appears to be less consistent among species, regions, and years. Changes in the pattern and timing of waterfowl migration in particular may result in cascading effects on ecosystem function, and socioeconomic and cultural outcomes. We investigated changes in the migration of 15 waterfowl species along a major flyway corridor of continental importance in northeastern North America using 43 years of community-science data. We built spatially- and temporally-explicit hierarchical generative additive models for each species and demonstrated that climate, specifically the interaction between minimum temperature and precipitation, significantly influences migration phenology f...