DOI: 10.5061/dryad.x3ffbg7fp
title: Data from: Community science validates climate suitability projections from ecological niche modeling

description: Climate change poses an intensifying threat to many bird species, and
 projections of future climate suitability provide insight into how species
 may shift their distributions in response. Climate suitability is
 characterized using ecological niche models (ENMs), which correlate
 species occurrence data with current environmental covariates and project
 future distributions using the modeled relationships together with climate
 predictions. Despite their widespread adoption, ENMs rely on several
 assumptions that are rarely validated in situ and can be highly sensitive
 to modeling decisions, precluding their reliability in conservation
 decision-making. Using data from a novel, large-scale community science
 program, we developed dynamic occupancy models to validate near-term
 climate suitability projections for bluebirds and nuthatches in summer and
 winter. We estimated occupancy, colonization, and extinction dynamics
 across species’ ranges in the United States in relation to projected
 climate suitability in the 2020s, and used a Gibbs variable selection
 approach to quantify evidence of species-climate relationships. We also
 included a Bird Conservation Region strata-level random effect to examine
 among-strata variation in occupancy that may be attributable to land-use
 and ecoregional differences. Across species and seasons, we found strong
 evidence that initial occupancy and colonization were positively related
 to 2020 climate suitability, illustrating an independent validation of
 projections from ENMs across a large geographic area. Random strata
 effects revealed that occupancy probabilities were generally higher than
 average in core areas and lower than average in peripheral areas of
 species’ ranges, and served as a first step in identifying spatial
 patterns of occupancy from these community science data. Our findings lend
 much-needed support to the use of ENM projections for addressing questions
 about potential climate-induced changes in species’ occupancy dynamics.
 More broadly, our work highlights the value of community scientist
 observations for ground-truthing projections from statistical models and
 for refining our understanding of the processes shaping species’
 distributions under a changing climate.
description: Observations of bluebirds and nuthatches were collected as part
 of the National Audubon Society's Climate Watch program (https://www.audubon.org/features/esri-climate-watch). Volunteers conducted point counts at 12 points within a 10 x 10 km 'square' and submitted observations as separate checklists per point. The dataset provided here represents the collated checklists for each species (three bluebird species, three nuthatch species) in each season (summer, winter) during 2016 - 2018 (only bluebird data available in 2016). Additional variables used in analyses are also included in each species-season dataset.
description: Example model code used to run analyses is provided in the
 supplementary material of the published article in Ecological
 Applications.