Can climate explain interannual local extinctions among bird species?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim Geographical variations in species richness are strongly related to temperature and precipitation. On ecological time‐scales, these variations in species richness should reflect rates of immigration and local extinction (extirpation). Here we ask whether the probability of local extinction in passerine birds covaries with climate. Specifically, we test whether local extinctions increase with climatic harshness or with the climatic distance from a species' optimal climate. Location USA and Canada. Methods We obtained bird counts from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) from 1967 to 2012. For each BBS route, we calculated the probability of interannual local extinction for each of 206 passerine birds. We then used linear mixed‐effects models and structural equation modelling to relate local extinction rates to our hypothesized predictor variables: temperature, precipitation and their distance from the species' most occupied temperature and precipitation. Results We found that local extinctions are nearly independent of temperature and precipitation: no climate is inherently more extinction‐prone than any other. Similarly, the climatic distance from a species' maximally occupied temperature and precipitation has only an extremely weak positive effect on the probability of local extinction. We found that only abundance has a strong negative effect on the probability of local extinction. Main conclusions Although variations in local extinctions are typically spatially structured, we conclude that they are not related to contemporary climate in a consistent way among species. Broad‐scale geographical gradients of species richness are unlikely to be driven by higher extinction rates in climatically harsh areas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.130 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".