Title: Combining NEON and remotely sensed habitats to forecast climate impacts on community dynamics
Presenting Author: James Clark
Organization: Duke University
Co-Author(s): Jennifer J. Swenson, Amanda M. Schwantes, Christopher Kilner, Bradley J. Tomasek, Christoph Hellmayr. Chase Nunez

Abstract:
The impact of climate change on communities will depend on interactions with local habitat, or habitat-climate interactions (HxCs), and indirect effects of other species, which are also responding to climate change. Because climate is filtered by local habitat, predictions have to start from knowledge of how habitat complexity affects communities. Species interactions complicate climate effects, because each species experiences habitat complexity (HC) at a different scale from flightless insects to large vertebrates. Current species distribution models (SDMs) used to anticipate community responses to climate change predict from 0 to 50% species loss. These predictions likely suffer from the fact that models predict species in isolation from one another, ignoring interactions. Our AIST-funded project combines National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) survey data of small mammals, ground beetles, plants, and mosquitoes, as well as Breeding Bird Survey and eBird data on birds, as well as data from long-term monitoring plots, including the US Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis, with the mast system of pulsed seed and fruit production from trees. Remotely-sensed imagery and the NEON airborne observatory will be used to characterize multi-scale habitat/landscape diversity, with spatial and multispectral detail (1m) that goes well beyond that available from interpolated climate data (400m) and land cover/use maps (30m). Frequent imagery collection provides the opportunity to incorporate phenology dynamics across seasons as well as year-to-year change. We are building a user and data access interface enabling managers and scientists both to run our generalized joint attribute modeling (GJAM) to integrate the joint distribution of species, including indirect relationships, with proper sensitivity. This update on methodological advances reports on our latest results quantifying the joint responses of communities to HC and HxC, with species indirect effects, where each has its own scale of response, depending on movement, storage and survival, and diet breadth. Results will be used to determine if (and how) complex communities might promote species diversity. The model will be used to forecast community change and reorganization, including prediction and attribution of climate risk by species and habitat and how it is shared across species groups. Together these results will extend ecological forecasting to include how communities respond to climate change.