Climate variables are not the dominant predictor of Arctic shorebird distributions.

ABSTRACT: Competing theoretical perspectives about whether or not climate is the dominant factor influencing species' distributions at large spatial scales have important consequences when habitat suitability models are used to address conservation problems. In this study, we tested how much variables in addition to climate help to explain habitat suitability for Arctic-breeding shorebirds. To do this we model species occupancy using path analyses, which allow us to estimate the indirect effects of climate on other predictor variables, such as land cover. We also use deviance partitioning to quantify the total relative importance of climate versus additional predictors in explaining species occupancy. We found that individual land cover variables are often stronger predictors than the direct and ind

SUBMITTER: Anderson CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10191349 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature