Harnessing community science data to predict upward range shifts in montane birds

May 2020 - December 2022

Published in Biotropica, June 2022!

Species in mountainous regions move upslope to track warming climates. Using community science data from eBird, we designed a statistical technique to detect these using observations from the East Himalayas. This showed that even within 13 years, species show frequency declines consistent with upslope shifts! After this, I spent a substantial amount of time scaling this up to a global-level synthesis across generalized hotspots, but this proved to be too biased to carry out with eBird data without local-scale topographic knowledge. Maybe I revisit this some day when eBird has a billion checklists…