The thermal environment limits species ranges through its influence on physiology and resource distributions
and thus affects species richness patterns over broad spatial scales. Understanding how temperature drives
species richness patterns is particularly important in the context of global change and for effective conservation
planning. Landsat 8's Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) allows direct mapping of temperature at moderate spatial
resolutions (100 m, downscaled by the USGS to 30 m), overcoming limitations inherent in coarse interpolated
weather station data that poorly capture fine-scale temperature patterns over broad areas. TIRS data thus offer
the unique opportunity to understand how the thermal environment influences species richness patterns. Our
aim was to develop and assess the ability of TIRS-based temperature metrics to predict patterns of winter bird
richness across the conterminous United States during winter, a period of marked temperature stress for birds.
We used TIRS data from 2013-2018 to derive metrics of relative temperature and intra-seasonal thermal heterogeneity.
To quantify winter bird richness across the conterminous US, we tabulated the richness only for
resident bird species, i.e., those species that do not move between the winter and breeding seasons, from the
North American Breeding Bird Survey, the most extensive survey of birds in the US. We expected that relative
temperature and thermal heterogeneity would have strong positive associations with winter bird richness because
colder temperatures heighten temperature stress for birds, and thermal heterogeneity is a proxy for
thermal niches and potential thermal refugia that can support more species. We further expected that both the
strength of the effects and the relative importance of these variables would be greater for species with greater
climate sensitivity, such as small-bodied species and climate-threatened species (i.e., those with large discrepancies
between their current and future distributions following projected climate change). Consistent with
our predictions, relative temperature and thermal heterogeneity strongly positively influenced winter bird
richness patterns, with statistical models explaining 37.3% of the variance in resident bird richness. Thermal
heterogeneity was the strongest predictor of small-bodied and climate-threatened species in our models, whereas
relative temperature was the strongest predictor of large-bodied and climate-stable species. Our results demonstrate
the important role that the thermal environment plays in governing winter bird richness patterns and
highlight the previously underappreciated role that intra-seasonal thermal heterogeneity may have in supporting
high winter bird species richness. Our findings thus illustrate the exciting potential for TIRS data to guide
conservation planning in an era of global change.
Landsat 8 TIRS-derived temperature and thermal heterogeneity predict winter bird species richness patterns across the conterminous United States
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