Conservation policy in a changing world: integrating citizen science data from national monitoring schemes to model impacts of global change scenarios

Future BirdScenarios will be a novel synthesis of long-term data from a suite of national bird monitoring programs, and we will develop state-of-the-art statistical tools to predict future bird distributions under alternative global change scenarios. The research questions of the project's four work packages are: a) Which functional traits are the best predictors of the effects of environmental change on the abundance and distributions of birds, and how will turnover in local and regional community structure affect ecosystem services? b) How can we mitigate the effects of climate change and human land use as drivers of change for breeding bird populations? c) How can we improve the conservation value of networks of protected areas if bird distributions change in the future? d) How will cross-seasonal interactions between the breeding and nonbreeding seasons affect avian responses to global change?