Team Wins IDS NRA (JAS)
November 1, 2003 - Jim Smith has been funded to lead a groundbreaking effort to develop new approaches to modeling bird energicts and species richness. The proposal was submitted in response to the NASA Research Announcement (NRA) NRA-03-OES-03, entitled "Interdisciplinary Science in the NASA Earth Science Enterprise."
This proposal addresses the fundamental question of why birds occur where and when they do, i.e., what are the causative factors that determine the spatiotemporal distributions, abundance, or richness of bird species? Ultimately, species persistence is an evolutionary optimization problem in reproductive success subject to environmental, physiological, inter- and intra-species interactions, random stochastic events, and many other abiotic and biotic factors. Many of these variables operate at both proximate and broader space and time scales.
This is an exciting time for NASA ecological studies, given our accumulated wisdom, computational capabilities, access to widely distributed datasets, and new measurements made possible by satellite observations. We are beginning to understand the distribution and functioning of plant communities at multiple scales using satellite data and integrated models of climate, vegetation physiology, community structure, and productivity. We believe the time is ripe to take a similar approach and directly model organisms and their interactions with the landscape and with each other. We focus on birds because of their plasticity, adaptability, close coupling to their environment, and recent progress that has been made in understanding the role of climate in their large scale biogeographical distributions.
We propose to take the first steps toward building a satellite, data-driven model of avian energetics and species richness based on individual bird physiology and morphology, behavior, interaction with the spatio-temporal habitat and available resources, and, later, population dynamics. We pay particular attention to the reproductive and fledging phases of bird behavior and to wintering ranges because of the availability of many independent data sets to test model predictions and assumptions.
The Distribution and
Abundance of Bird Species:
Towards a Satellite, Data-Driven Avian Energetics and Species Richness Model
James A. Smith
John L. Schnase
NASA Goddard Space
Flight Center
John A. Wiens
Nature Conservancy
Adrian H. Farmer
USGS Fort Collins Science Center
Therese M. Donovan
University of Vermont
