Webinar: Detecting and addressing climate change impacts on birds and their habitats

Title: Detecting and addressing climate change impacts on birds and their habitat in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States
Presenter: Dr. Sam Veloz, Spatial Ecologist, Point Blue Conservation Science
Date: February 28th, 2014 at 11 am PST

Abstract:
Rapid ongoing climate change presents new challenges to natural resource managers. Effects are usually at large landscape scales and management actions must account for future uncertainty, often based solely on locally available data. Because birds are known to be indicators of ecosystem health and function and are cost effective to survey at multiple scales, they can provide early warnings of broader changes that may accompany climate change and other landscape-scale level environmental stressors. Unfortunately, infrastructure and coordinated efforts devoted to monitoring environmental change to support management are currently lacking throughout the western US and northern Mexico.

The Sonoran Joint Venture and Point Blue Conservation Science have developed models of projected climate change impacts on birds to identify areas of potential vulnerability in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico. We are now in the next phase of this project: the creation of a bilingual, online web portal and tool where users can view and download projected distributional changes in birds, habitat, and climate under several global circulation models. The web portal can be used by managers to help identify climate change impacts, prioritize monitoring and adaptation opportunities, and improve the capacity for making conservation decisions under climate change.

About the Presenter:
Sam Veloz, Ph.D., is a spatial ecologist with Point Blue Conservation Science. Sam is primarily working on projects that explore how species will respond to global change, including climate change and other human modifications to the environment. Using models that test the sensitivity of species to changing environmental conditions, Sam seeks to evaluate what species or places might be most vulnerable to global change. As a member of the Climate Change and Informatics group at Point Blue, Sam's work is dedicated to the development of tools, frameworks and techniques for transforming the wealth of scientific data compiled by Point Blue and its partners into successful conservation outcomes and ecosystem knowledge. Sam received his Ph. D. in ecology from the University of California Davis in 2008 and his BA in environmental studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz.