Using acoustic survey data to improve eBird-based species distribution
models for tropical rainforest birds
Abstract
A key goal in ecology is to develop more effective ways to understand
species’ distributions in order to facilitate both their study and
conservation. Many species distribution modeling analyses have been
performed to date, using either structured survey data or unstructured
citizen science data; these two pools of data have tradeoffs in terms of
data density, spatiotemporal coverage, and accuracy. Recent studies have
shown that combining structured and unstructured survey data can greatly
improve the accuracy of species distribution models for birds, but most
of this work has focused on north temperate bird species and uses bird
atlas data that is much more common in the temperate zone than
elsewhere. We sought to adapt a data pooling approach from the
literature on north temperate bird biology to create distribution models
for a selection of secretive suboscine bird species that occur in a
highly diverse region of the southwestern Amazon.