Bird abundance in the United States has been declining for over half a century likely as a result of habitat changes. In the Southeastern U.S., urban areas are growing which has reduced forested area and increased fragmentation resulting in decreasing bird populations. In the long term, climate change is expected to result in changes in precipitation and temperature patterns, and sea level rise will reduce coastal habitat. Therefore, it is important to conserve both what is currently present, in terms of species, habitats and ecosystems, and to plan for imminent conservation challenges. Given limited conservation resources, we must ensure conservation efforts are focused where they have the greatest benefit.  We developed a priority scheme for conserving bird habitat in around Charleston, South Carolina, that takes into account current conservation priorities as well as future predictions of climate change.

Results/Conclusions

For each of 30 avian focal species, we produced a spatially explicit model of current conservation priorities using species' predicted distributions from the Southeastern Gap Analysis Project, habitat suitability and population connectivity features. Habitat suitability was based on landscape-level characteristics including appropriate hydrology, geography, geology and soil, and on constraints on management actions (e.g. ability to manage with fire). The models were smoothed using kernel density estimators with kernel size based on dispersal distance. We used urbanization and climate models to predict habitat 100 years into the future and repeated spatially-explicit models at each 25 year time-step. Conservation priority maps for each species were created by combining all spatially-explicit models for the 100 year time period. We then used species priority maps to create an overall priority map for the Charleston area that can be used by stakeholders to inform decisions about where to conserve habitat for sustainable bird populations into the future. This project is a preliminary step in a larger project that will produce priority models integrating climate change and urbanization in conservation planning in five states in the Southeastern U.S.