Between a rock and a hard place: the impacts of climate change and housing development on breeding birds in California
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Between a rock and a hard place: the impacts of climate change and housing development on breeding birds in California Dennis Jongsomjit • Diana Stralberg • Thomas Gardali • Leonardo Salas • John Wiens
Received: 31 August 2012 / Accepted: 15 November 2012 / Published online: 6 December 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Present Address: D. Stralberg Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, CW405 Biological Sciences Building, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E9, Canada
ment density projections in California. We compared their potential influence on the distributions of 64 focal bird species representing six major vegetation communities. Averaged across GCMs, species responding positively to climate change were projected to gain 253,890 km2 and species responding negatively were projected to lose 335,640 km2. Development accounted for 32 % of the overall reductions in projected species distributions. In terms of land area, suburban and exurban development accounted for the largest portion of land-use impacts on species’ distributions. Areas in which climatic suitability and housing density were both projected to increase were concentrated along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and areas of the north coast. Areas of decreasing climatic suitability and increasing housing density were largely concentrated within the Central Valley. Our analyses suggest that the cumulative effects of future housing development and climate change will be large for many bird species, and that some species projected to expand their distributions with climate change may actually lose ground to development. This suggests that a key climate change adaptation strategy will be to minimize the impacts of housing development. To do this effectively, comprehensive policies to guide land use decisions are needed at the broader scales of climate change.
Present Address: J. Wiens School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia
Keywords California Exurban development Generalized additive models Land-use change Species distribution models Urbanization
Abstract Although the effects of climate change on species distributions have received considerable attention, land-use change continues to threaten wildlife by contributing to habitat loss and degradation. We compared projected spatial impacts of climate change and housing development across a range of housing densities on California’s birds to evaluate the relative potential impacts of each. We used species-distribution models in concert with current and future climate projections and spatially explicit housing-develop-
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10980-012-9825-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. D. Jongsomjit (&) D. Stralberg T. Gardali L. Salas J. Wiens PRBO Conservation Science, 3820 Cypress Drive, Petaluma, CA 94954, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Introduction Climate cha
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