This project assesses the potential effects of climate change on tidal marsh habitats and bird populations, identifies priority sites for tidal marsh conservation and restoration, and developes a web-based mapping tool for managers to interactively display and query results in the San Francisco Bay. Management actions that are robust or that fail under the climate change scenarios can be identified through the mapping tool.

This project will develop a foundation for monitoring environmental change by identifying where and what to monitor in order to evaluate climate-change impacts. Initial focus was on landbirds, however a framework will be developed that recommends standardized monitoring for other taxa and environmental attributes. Ultimately, this project will answer the question "How do we monitor the ecological consequences of climate change?"

The Pacific Flyway Shorebird Survey is a coordinated multi-partner research and monitoring program led by Point Blue Conservation Science designed to guide the management and conservation of wintering shorebirds in the Pacific Flyway, a migration corridor stretching from Alaska to Chile. The first phase of the effort has focused on California's Central Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, and the coastal regions of California and northern Baja California, Mexico. These regions provide critical habitat for large populations of migrating and wintering shorebirds in the Pacific Flyway.

This project designs a monitoring program and protocol to detect the effects of climate change on tidal marsh bird population abundance and distribution. It is a companion to the project “Tidal Marsh Bird Population and Habitat Assessment for San Francisco Bay under Future Climate Change Conditions” and will build on its products, enabling evaluation of the long-term viability of four tidal-marsh bird species threatened by impacts of climate change: Clapper Rail, Black Rail, Common Yellowthroat, and Song Sparrow.

The Upland Habitat Goals project is a science-based process using existing data supplemented by expert opinion to identify a Conservation Lands Network for biodiversity preservation to inform conservation investments. The final report recommends the types, amounts and distribution of habitats, linkages, compatible uses and the ecological processes needed to sustain diversity. Other products include an online decision support tool and access to a GIS database.

This project analyzes downscaled climate model data to assess the geography of climate change at scales relevant to actual conservation actions. This work analyzes the California Essential Habitat Connectivity products to determine which protected lands are most vulnerable and which of the proposed corridors would partially mitigate climate change threats.

This project will develop landscape change scenarios based upon water availability and precipitation and temperature patterns projected from downscaled models and investigate impacts of these changes on habitats and ecology of waterfowl, shorebirds, and other waterbirds in the Central Valley. The goal of this work is to work with the Central Valley Joint Venture to adapt the scenario modeling project results and modeling tool so they can be used to incorporate climate, urbanization, and water supply management impacts on waterbird habitats into its conservation planning.

This project will help the Central Valley Joint Venture (CVJV) track gains and losses of key bird and waterfowl habitats at a landscape scale. This will allow the CVJV to effectively monitor and evaluate habitats essential to conservation planning for wildlife species. This work is important for identifying, assembling, and analyzing data for key habitats of concern and will provide a foundation for future monitoring.

This project uses species distribution modeling to assess the risk to habitat change under climate change scenarios for rare plants. The project models the current distribution of the species, uses these models to predict the species distribution given climate change, calculates current and future range size, calculates the amount of overlap of predicted future distribution with current distribution, and assesses where barriers and protected areas are located with reference to the change in species distribution.

This project researched the expected variation in avian demographic responses to environmental change across a gradient of species and landscapes from the San Francisco Bay to the Central Valley of California. Project partners used two avian taxa, waterfowl and songbirds, as case studies for the integration of long-term demographic data with climate change variables.