Species-specific variations and local landscape characteristics, but not temperature, predict avian species abundances in the Appalachian Mountains

Abstract

Increasingly severe climate change has become a threat to global biodiversity in recent years. It is unclear, however, whether the threat to biodiversity posed by climate change is equal in magnitude to threats to biodiversity posed by factors such as land-use change and deforestation. The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) contains annual species abundance counts on over four hundred species dating back to 1966, and therefore allows for the investigation of the effects of warming temperatures in recent decades on species abundances. I combined BBS counts on fifteen bird species along sixteen survey routes across the Appalachian Mountains with natural history data from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, geospatial landscape data from The Nature Conservancy, and geospatial vegetation data from the National Park Service to investigate the interacting effects of climate change, natural history, local landscape characteristics, and local vegetation on avian populations. By building a variety of generalized linear models (GLMs) in RStudio and ranking them according to Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC), I found that species-specific variations and local landscape characteristics, but not temperature, most accurately predicted species abundances across different bird species and locations in the Appalachian Mountains. My finding suggests that land-use change, not climate change, is the primary threat to avian biodiversity in the Appalachian Mountains.