Modeling the South American range of the cerulean warbler

Abstract

Successful conservation of rare species requires detailed knowledge of the species’ distribution. Modeling spatial distribution is an efficient means of locating potential habitats. Cerulean Warbler (Dendroica cerulea, Parulidae) was listed as a Vulnerable Species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in 2004. These neotropical migratory birds breed in eastern North America. The entire population migrates to the northern Andes in South America to spend the nonbreeding period. As part of a larger international conservation effort, we developed spatial hypotheses of the bird’s occurrence in South America. We summarized physical, climatic, and recent land-cover data for the northern Andes using ESRI software, ArcGIS. We developed five hypothetical distributions based on Mahalanobis D, GARP, Biomapper, MAXENT, and Domain models. Combining results of the different models on the same map allowed us to design a rigorous strategy to ground-truth the map and thus to identify sites for protection of the species in South America.

Citation

Barker, S., Benítez, S., Baldy, J., Cisneros Heredia, D., Colorado Zuluaga, G., Cuesta, F., Davidson, I., Díaz, D., Ganzenmueller, A., García, S., Girvan, M. K., Guevara, E., Hamel, P., Hennessey, A. B., Hernández, O. L., Herzog, S., Mehlman, D., Moreno, M. I., Ozdenerol, E., Ramoni-Perazzi, P., Romero, M., Romo, D., Salaman, P., Santander, T., Tovar, C., Welton, M., Will, T., Pedraza, C., Galindo, G. 2006. Modeling the South American range of the cerulean warbler. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth ESRI International User Conference, San Diego, California, 6-11 August 2006.