Amazona obscured occurrences, background points, and environmental data

Aim: Introduced species offer insight on whether and how organisms can shift their ecological niches during translocation. The genus Amazona offers a clear test case, where sister species Red-crowned (A. viridigenalis) and Lilac-crowned Parrots (A. finschi) have established breeding populations in southern California following introduction via the pet trade from Mexico where they do not coexist. After establishment in the 1980s, introduced population sizes have increased, with mixed species flocks found throughout urban Los Angeles. Here, we investigate the differences between the environmental conditions of the native and introduced ranges of these now co-occurring species.
Location: Southern California and Mexico.
Methods: Using environmental data on climate and habitat from their native and introduced ranges, we tested whether Red-crowned and Lilac-crowned Parrots have divergent realized niches between their native ranges, and whether each species has significantly shifted its realiz..., Observations for the Amazona parrots in southern California were collected on iNaturalist through the Free-Flying Los Angeles Parrot Project (FLAPP). Individual parrots were scored based on morphological features to confirm species identification. Only research-grade observations were included in our analysis, which was determined by two agreeing independent scorings of species identification. Observations for Amazona parrots in their separate native ranges of Mexico were downloaded from the eBird database, with filtering done to remove any observations found in introduced areas surrounding their native ranges. Red-crowned Parrot data for Texas and Florida was downloaded from eBird as well and filtered to only include observations with media for species identification. Buffers were created for each population to create randomly generated background points. Environmental data was downloaded from various online databases including Bioclim, MODIS data, and global scatterometer data. The en..., All data were processed using R 4.2.1, # Amazona Obscured Occurrences, Background Points, and Environmental Data

## Brenda Ramirez, , Moore Laboratory of Zoology, Occidental College

The main file for our Amazona analysis is \"obscured_amazona.csv\" which contains obscured coordinates of the Red-crowned (Amazona viridigenalis) and Lilac-crowned (Amazona finschi) Parrots from both their native and introduced ranges. These coordinates were obscured to protect the endangered parrots from the risk of poaching. To obscure the coordinates, we followed best practices by generalizing the spatial information to a metric grid where all records are referenced to the centroid and then rounding the coordinates to 0.1 degrees. We generated background points within buffers of each population (California, Texas, Florida, and both coasts of Mexico) and extracted environmental values from them as well as the true occurrence points at 1km^2 resolution to assess niche characteristics and evaluate how they differed.

## Description of the data an...