Effective wildlife management must track shifting species distributions and community dynamics at the pace of change.

Project Brief:

California’s wildlife and habitats are undergoing near constant change from land use pressures and shifting climates. We’re leveraging the massive monitoring datasets collected by the State, along with powerful cloud-based analytical pipelines, to model habitat suitability and diversity for dozens of species statewide and at high temporal resolution, facilitating real-time wildlife management decision making and a better understanding of how wildlife communities change over time.

Project Description:

Landscapes across California are constantly changing, driven by intensifying human land use and a warming climate, with both acute (e.g., wildfire, land clearing) and long-term (e.g., altered habitat availability, shifting species ranges) effects on wildlife. Single species assessments of distribution and abundance, or static snapshots of habitat suitability at a single point in time, are therefore insufficient for proactive wildlife management.

Working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, we are integrating more than a decade of monitoring data from dozens of mammal and bird species and thousands of monitoring sites across the state with landscape data layers developed at high spatial and temporal resolution to model and track changes in wildlife communities over time. We will quantify changes in bird and mammal occupancy, diversity, and habitat quality over the last four decades, examine the impacts of predicted future climate and land use conditions on California biodiversity, and update our models annually as new wildlife and landscape data become available. This work will ensure that the most up-to-date information is available to inform wildlife management and land use planning and will be integrated into decision support tools that will help managers prioritize conservation efforts now and into the future.

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