Video - Forecasting the Future of Alberta’s Birds

Environmental science regularly tries to answer specific questions about how animals respond to environmental variation. When designing such studies, most researchers try to limit the habitat conditions they study to address specific questions such as how many birds are in habitat A versus habitat B. While effective for answering specific questions, such an approach is not effective for understanding large scale patterns in space and in relation to the full range of natural variation that animals are exposed to. Programs like the ABMI provide important data for understanding the spatial distribution of animals at very large scales, which is crucial for reporting on the status of Alberta wildlife as well as developing tools for predicting change at large scales caused by climate change and human land-use. In this talk, I will demonstrate how data from ABMI can be combined with designed research studies to answer questions at spatial scales and temporal extents that are not possible for a single researcher to achieve. Applied examples of how such models can be used in climate change and land-use prediction will be shown.