Citizen science to the rescue: Predicting avian species range shifts in response to changing climate conditions in the Metropolis Ruhr, Germany

Abstract

Cities are already confronted with effects of climate change, and a further increase in vulnerability is to be expected in future. Climate conditions such as temperature, wind velocity or precipitation differ already significantly between cities and their surroundings, named as urban heat island effect. These disparities will even increase due to densification, fast encroaching urban sprawl and intensified sealing. Nevertheless, urban areas as a compound of several divers habitat structures and biodiversity hotspots can make major contributions to conservation goals and preservation of worldwide biodiversity. But besides already acknowledged effects on human beings in urban areas, changing environmental conditions also affects distribution patterns of species in urban environments. However, research about spatially explicit shifts in habitat suitability for species in dense and fragmented urban environments are still lacking. Combining citizen science data and remote sensing techniques with the predictive power of species distribution models can play an important role to comprehensively investigate range shifts caused by future land use and changing climate conditions.

An ensemble of different machine learning algorithms, CS datasets of multiple avian species expected to react differently to urban conditions and environmental predictors consisting of bioclimatic variables, digital surface models and land use derived information were applied to forecast avian biodiversity patterns and distributions. By incorporating future land use and future climate projections for divergent Shared Socioeconomic Pathways species climate change induced range shifts were predicted, assuming more distinct shifts with higher concentration pathways.

Models of species range shifts under different future environmental conditions enable policymakers to encounter biodiversity loss in urban areas, strengthen the resilience of cities under climate change conditions and contributes to sophisticated decisions in future landscape planning.