Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Between a rock and a hard place: the impacts of climate change and housing development on breeding birds in California

  • Research Article
  • Published:
Landscape Ecology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Although the effects of climate change on species distributions have received considerable attention, land-use change continues to threaten wildlife by contributing to habitat loss and degradation. We compared projected spatial impacts of climate change and housing development across a range of housing densities on California’s birds to evaluate the relative potential impacts of each. We used species-distribution models in concert with current and future climate projections and spatially explicit housing-development density projections in California. We compared their potential influence on the distributions of 64 focal bird species representing six major vegetation communities. Averaged across GCMs, species responding positively to climate change were projected to gain 253,890 km2 and species responding negatively were projected to lose 335,640 km2. Development accounted for 32 % of the overall reductions in projected species distributions. In terms of land area, suburban and exurban development accounted for the largest portion of land-use impacts on species’ distributions. Areas in which climatic suitability and housing density were both projected to increase were concentrated along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and areas of the north coast. Areas of decreasing climatic suitability and increasing housing density were largely concentrated within the Central Valley. Our analyses suggest that the cumulative effects of future housing development and climate change will be large for many bird species, and that some species projected to expand their distributions with climate change may actually lose ground to development. This suggests that a key climate change adaptation strategy will be to minimize the impacts of housing development. To do this effectively, comprehensive policies to guide land use decisions are needed at the broader scales of climate change.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Ballard G, Herzog M, Fitzgibbon M, Moody M, Jongsomjit D, Stralberg D (2008) The California Avian Data Center, Petaluma, California. http://www.prbo.org/cadc. Accessed June 2008

  • Barbet-Massin M, Thuiller W, Jiguet F (2012) The fate of European breeding birds under climate, land-use and dispersal scenarios. Glob Chang Biol 18:881–890

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beardsley K, Thorne JH, Roth NE, Gao S, McCoy MC (2009) Assessing the influence of rapid urban growth and regional policies on biological resources. Landsc Urban Plan 93:172–183

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blair RB (1996) Land use and avian species diversity along an urban gradient. Ecol Appl 6:506–519

    Google Scholar 

  • Blair R (2004) The effects of urban sprawl on birds at multiple levels of biological organization. Ecol Soc 9. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss5/art2/. Accessed July 2012

  • Bomhard B, Richardson DM, Donaldson JS, Hughes GO, Midgley GF et al (2005) Potential impacts of future land use and climate change on the Red List status of the Proteaceae in the Cape Floristic region, South Africa. Glob Chang Biol 11:1452–1468

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brook B, Sodhi N, Bradshaw C (2008) Synergies among extinction drivers under global change. Trends Ecol Evol 23:453–460

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Burchell R, Lowenstein G, Dolphin W, Galley C, Downs A, Seskin S, Still K, Moore T (2002) Cost of Sprawl-2000. TCRP report 74. National Academy Press, Washington, DC

    Google Scholar 

  • Chace JF, Walsh JJ (2006) Urban effects on native avifauna: a review. Landsc Urban Plan 74:46–69

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chapin FI, Carpenter SR, Kofinas GP, Folke C, Abel N, Clark WC, Olsson P, Smith DMS, Walker B, Young OR (2010) Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet. Trends Ecol Evol 25:241–249

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Chase M, Geupel GR (2005) The use of avian focal species for conservation planning in California. In: Bird conservation implementation and integration in the Americas: Proceedings of the third international partners in flight conference, General technical report PSW-GTR-191, pp 130–142

  • Crooks KR, Suarez AV, Bolger DT, Soulé ME (2001) Extinction and colonization of birds on habitat islands. Conserv Biol 15:159–172

    Google Scholar 

  • Daly C, Neilson RP, Phillips DL (1994) A statistical-topographic model for mapping climatological precipitation over mountainous terrain. J Appl Meteorol 33:140–158

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Danielsen KA, Lang RE, Fulton W (1999) Retracting suburbia: smart growth and the future of housing. House Policy Debate 10:513–540

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies RG, Orme CDL, Olson V, Thomas GH, Ross SG, Ding T-S, Rasmussen PC, Stattersfield AJ, Bennett PM, Blackburn TM, Owens IPF, Gaston KJ (2006) Human impacts and the global distribution of extinction risk. Proc Biol Sci 273:2127–2133

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Davis FW, Stoms DM, Hollander AD, Thomas KA, Stine PA, Odion D, Borchert MI, Thorne JH, Gray MV, Walker RE, Warner K, Graae J (1998) The California gap analysis project: final report. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA

  • de Chazal J, Rounsevell MDA (2009) Land-use and climate change within assessments of biodiversity change: a review. Glob Environ Chang 19:306–315

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Desrochers RE, Kerr JT, Currie DJ (2011) How, and how much, natural cover loss increases species richness. Glob Ecol Biogeogr 20:857–867

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dirnböck T, Dullinger S, Grabherr G (2003) A regional impact assessment of climate and land-use change on alpine vegetation. J Biogeogr 30:401–417

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • U.S. EPA (2009) Land-use scenarios: National-scale housing-density scenarios consistent with climate change storylines (final report). EPA/600/R-08/076f. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, USA

  • ESRI (2006) ArcGIS 9.2. Environmental Systems Research Institute. Redlands, California, USA

  • Fielding AH, Bell JF (1997) A review of methods for the assessment of prediction errors in conservation presence/absence models. Environ Conserv 24:38–49

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fitzpatrick MC, Hargrove WW (2009) The projection of species distribution models and the problem of non-analog climate. Biodivers Conserv 18:2255–2261

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Forister ML, McCall AC, Sanders NJ, Fordyce JA, Thorne JH, O’Brien J, Waetjen DP, Shapiro AM (2010) Compounded effects of climate change and habitat alteration shift patterns of butterfly diversity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107:2088–2092

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Fraterrigo JM, Wiens JA (2005) Bird communities of the Colorado Rocky Mountains along a gradient of exurban development. Landsc Urban Plan 71:263–275

    Google Scholar 

  • Guisan A, Theurillat J (2000) Assessing alpine plant vulnerability to climate change: a modeling perspective. Integr Assess 1:307–320

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hammer RB, Radeloff VC, Fried JS, Stewart SI (2007) Wildland-urban interface housing growth during the 1990s in California, Oregon, and Washington. Int J Wildland Fire 16:255–265

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hansen A, Urban D (1992) Avian response to landscape pattern: the role of species’ life histories. Landscape Ecol 7:163–180

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hansen A, Knight R, Marzluff J, Powell S, Brown K, Gude P, Jones K (2005) Effects of exurban development on biodiversity: patterns, mechanisms, and research needs. Ecol Appl 15:1893–1905

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harris RJ, Reed JM (2002) Behavioral barriers to non-migratory movements of birds. Ann Zool Fenn 39:275–290

    Google Scholar 

  • Hastie T, Tibshirani R (1990) Generalized additive models. Chapman and Hall, London

  • Heller NE, Zavaleta ES (2009) Biodiversity management in the face of climate change: a review of 22 years of recommendations. Biol Conserv 142:14–32

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hill JK, Collingham YC, Thomas CD, Blakeley DS, Fox R, Moss D, Huntley B (2001) Impacts of landscape structure on butterfly range expansion. Ecol Lett 4:313–321

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • IPCC (2007) Climate change 2007: synthesis report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental panel on climate change. Geneva, Switzerland

  • Jetz W, Wilcove DS, Dobson AP (2007) Projected impacts of climate and land-use change on the global diversity of birds. PLoS Biol 5:1211–1219

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Johnston RF (2001) Synanthropic birds of North America. In: Marzluff JM, Bowman R, Donnelly R (eds) Avian ecology in an urbanizing world. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, pp 49–67

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Johnston RA, Lehmer E, Gao S, Roth N, McCoy M, (2008) UPlan land use allocation model 2.6 user’s manual. http://ice.ucdavis.edu/doc/uplan/resources. Accessed 20 August 2012

  • La Sorte FA, McKinney ML (2007) Compositional changes over space and time along an occurrence-abundance continuum: anthropogenic homogenization of the North American avifauna. J Biogeogr 34:2159–2167

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lepczyk CA, Flather CH, Radeloff VC, Pidgeon AM, Hammer RB, Liu J (2008) Human impacts on regional avian diversity and abundance. Conserv Biol 22:405–416

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Mackenzie DI, Nichols JD, Lachman GB, Droege S, Andrew Royle J, Langtimm CA (2003) Estimating site occupancy rates when detection probabilities are less than one. Ecology 8:2248–2255

    Google Scholar 

  • Marzluff JM, Bowman R, Donnelly R (2001) Avian ecology and conservation in an urbanizing world. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, Massachusetts, USA

  • McKinney ML (2002) Urbanization, biodiversity, and conservation. Bioscience 52:883–890

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Merenlender AM, Reed SE, Heise KL (2009) Exurban development influences woodland bird composition. Landsc Urban Plan 92:255–263

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Midgley G, Hannah L, Millar D, Rutherford M, Powrie L (2002) Assessing the vulnerability of species richness to anthropogenic climate change in a biodiversity hotspot. Global Ecol Biogeogr 11:445–451

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and human wellbeing: biodiversity synthesis. Island Press, Washington, DC. http://www.maweb.org/documents/document.354.aspx.pdf. Accessed February 2012

  • Myers N, Mittermeier RA, Mittermeier CG, da Fonseca GAB, Kent J (2000) Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature 403:853–858

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Pal JS, Giorgi F, Bi X, Elguindi N, Solmon F, Gao X, Rauscher SA, Francisco R, Zakey A, Winter J, Ashfaq M, Syed FS, Bell JL, Diffenbaugh NS, Karmacharya J, Konaré A, Martinez D, Da Rocha RP, Sloan LC, Steiner AL (2007) Regional climate modeling for the developing world: the ICTP RegCM3 and RegCNET. B Am Meteorol Soc 88:1395–1409

  • Peterson AT, Ortega-Huerta MA, Bartley J, Sanchez-Cordero V, Soberón J, Buddemeier RH, Stockwell DRB (2002) Future projections for Mexican faunas under global climate change scenarios. Nature 41:626–629

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pidgeon AM, Radeloff VC, Flather CH, Lepczyk CA, Clayton MK, Hawbaker TJ, Hammer RB (2007) Associations of forest bird species richness with housing and landscape patterns across the USA. Ecol Appl 17:1989–2010

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Pompe S, Hanspach J, Badeck F, Klotz S, Thuiller W, Kühn I (2008) Climate and land use change impacts on plant distributions in Germany. Biol Lett 4:564–567

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Poole A (ed) (2009) The birds of North America online. Cornell laboratory of ornithology, Ithaca, New York, USA. http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/. Accessed August 2009

  • Pyke CR (2004) Habitat loss confounds climate change impacts. Front Ecol Environ 2:178–182

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • R Development Core Team (2010) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria

  • Radeloff VC, Hammer RB, Stewart SI, Fried JS, Holcomb SS, McKeefry JF (2005) The wildland-urban interface in the United States. Ecol Appl 15:799–805

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Radeloff VC, Stewart SI, Hawbaker TJ, Gimmi U, Pidgeon AM, Flather CH, Hammer RB, Helmers DP (2010) Housing growth in and near United States protected areas limits their conservation value. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107:940–945

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Reif J, Št’astný K, Bejček V (2010) Contrasting effects of climatic and habitat changes on birds with northern range limits in central Europe as revealed by an analysis of breeding bird distribution in the Czech Republic. Acta Ornithol 45:83–90

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sala OE, Chapin FS 3rd, Armesto JJ, Berlow E, Bloomfield J, Dirzo R, Huber-Sanwald E, Huenneke LF, Jackson RB, Kinzig A, Leemans R, Lodge DM, Mooney HA, Oesterheld M, Poff NL, Sykes MT, Walker BH, Walker M, Wall DH (2000) Global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100. Science 287:1770–1774

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Sauer J, Hines J, Fallon J (2008) The North American breeding bird survey results and analysis 1966–2007. USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, Maryland, USA

  • Sokolov AP, Stone PH, Forest CE, Prinn R, Sarofim MC, Webster M, Paltsev S, Schlosser CA, Kicklighter D, Dutkiewicz S, Reilly J, Wang C, Felzer B, Melillo J, Jacoby HD (2009) Probabilistic forecast for twenty-first-century climate based on uncertainties in emissions (without policy) and climate parameters. J Clim 22:5175–5204

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spencer WD, Beier P, Penrod K, Winters K, Paulman C, Rustigian-Romsos H, Strittholt J, Parisi M, Pettler A (2010) California essential habitat connectivity project: a strategy for conserving a connected California. Report to the California Department of Transportation, California Department of Fish and Game, and Federal Highway Administration

  • State of California (2007) Population projections for California and its counties 2000–2050. Department of Finance, Sacramento, California, USA. http://www.dof.ca.gov/research/demographic/reports/projections/p-3/ Accessed August 2009

  • Stralberg D, Williams B (2002) Effects of residential development and landscape composition on the breeding birds of Placer County’s foothill oak woodlands. General technical report, PSW-GTR-184. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Berkeley, California, USA. http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/documents/gtr-184/031_Stralberg.pdf

  • Stralberg D, Jongsomjit D, Howell CA, Snyder MA, Alexander J, Wiens J, Root T (2009) Re-shuffling of species with climate disruption: a no-analog future for California birds? PLoS One 4(9):e6825. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006825

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Swets J (1988) Measuring the accuracy of diagnostic systems. Science 240:1285–1293

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Theobald DM (2001) Land-use dynamics beyond the American urban fringe. Geogr Rev 91:544–564

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Theobald DM (2005) Landscape patterns of exurban growth in the USA from 1980 to 2020. Ecol Soc 10. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol10/iss1/art32/. Accessed August 2012

  • Theobald DM, Miller JR, Hobbs NT (1997) Estimating the cumulative effects of development on wildlife habitat. Landsc Urban Plan 39:25–36

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thomas CD, Cameron A, Green RE, Bakkenes M, Beaumont LJ, Collingham YC, Erasmus BFN, De Siqueira MF, Grainger A, Hannah L, Hughes L, Huntley B, Van Jaarsveld AS, Midgley GF, Miles L, Ortega-Huerta MA, Peterson AT, Phillips OL, Williams SE (2004) Extinction risk from climate change. Nature 427:145–148

    Google Scholar 

  • Travis JMJ (2003) Climate change and habitat destruction: a deadly anthropogenic cocktail. Proc Roy Soc B Biol Sci 270:467–473

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • U.S. Department of the Interior (2009) Addressing the impacts of climate change on America’s water, land, and other natural and cultural resources. Secretarial Order No. 3289. http://www.doi.gov/lcc/index.cfm

  • Warren MS, Hill JK, Thomas JA, Asher J, Fox R, Huntley B, Roy DB, Telfer MG, Jeffcoate S, Harding P, Jeffcoate G, Willis SG, Greatorex-Davies JN, Moss D, Thomas CD (2001) Rapid responses of British butterflies to opposing forces of climate and habitat change. Nature 414:65–69

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Whittingham MJ, Stephens PA, Bradbury RB, Freckleton RP (2006) Why do we still use stepwise modeling in ecology and behaviour? J Anim Ecol 75:1182–1189

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wiens J, Stralberg D, Jongsomjit D, Howell CA, Snyder MA (2009) Niches, models, and climate change: assessing the assumptions and uncertainties. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:19729–19736

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Wiens JA, Seavy NE, Jongsomjit D (2011) Protected areas in climate space: what will the future bring? Biol Conserv 144:2119–2125

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wilcove DS, Rothstein D, Dubow J, Phillips A, Losos E (1998) Quantifying threats to imperiled species in the United States. Bioscience 48:607–615

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zeiner D, Laudenslayer W Jr, Mayer K, White M (eds) (1988) California’s Wildlife. California Department of Fish and Game, Sacramento, California, USA

Download references

Acknowledgments

Data collection was funded by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Game. The Nature Conservancy, the Marin Municipal Water District, The Presidio Trust, and the CALFED Bay-Delta Program. An anonymous donor, the Faucett Family Foundation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife California Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and the National Science Foundation (DBI-0542868) supported the research. D. Stralberg was supported by doctoral scholarships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the University of Alberta, and the Alberta Ingenuity Fund. We thank M. Snyder (UCSC) for the regional climate models, B. Bierwagen for access to the land-use models, and C.J. Ralph (RSL), J. Alexander (KBO), and the North American Breeding Bird Survey for access to and help with data, and countless PRBO biologists and staff for data collection. We are grateful to M. Fitzgibbon, D. Moody, and S. Veloz for help with data preparation and analysis, and to T. Root for inspiring this research. We appreciate the comments provided by G. Ballard, M. Araújo, J. Elith, E. Gustafson, and anonymous reviewers, which greatly improved this paper. This is PRBO contribution #1746.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Diana Stralberg

    Present address: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, CW405 Biological Sciences Building, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E9, Canada

  2. John Wiens

    Present address: School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

Authors and Affiliations

  1. PRBO Conservation Science, 3820 Cypress Drive, Petaluma, CA, 94954, USA

    Dennis Jongsomjit, Diana Stralberg, Thomas Gardali, Leonardo Salas & John Wiens

Authors
  1. Dennis Jongsomjit
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Diana Stralberg
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Thomas Gardali
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Leonardo Salas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. John Wiens
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dennis Jongsomjit.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 38 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Jongsomjit, D., Stralberg, D., Gardali, T. et al. Between a rock and a hard place: the impacts of climate change and housing development on breeding birds in California. Landscape Ecol 28, 187–200 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9825-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9825-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation