Each map is a visual guide to where a particular bird species may find the climate conditions it needs to survive in the future. We call this the bird’s “climatic range.”
The colors indicate the season in which the bird may find suitable conditions— blue for winter, yellow for summer (breeding), and green for where they overlap (indicating their presence year-round).
The darker the shaded area, the more likely it is the bird species will find suitable climate conditions to survive there.
The outline of the approximate current range for each season remains fixed in each frame, allowing you to compare how the range will expand, contract, or shift in the future.
The first frame of the animation shows where the bird can find a suitable climate today (based on data from 2000). The next three frames predict where this bird’s suitable climate may shift in the future—one frame each for 2020, 2050, and 2080.
You can play or pause the animation with the orange button in the lower left, or select an individual frame to study by clicking on its year.
Most rocky hillsides in the Southwest have a pair of Rufous-crowned Sparrows hopping about somewhere. This is a resident (non-migratory) species, so interpreting the Audubon climate model’s decoupling of its summer and winter ranges is challenging to interpret, but this species may be in serious trouble. The vast majority of climate space, in both summer and winter, is forecast to radically shift northward. An urge and ability to migrate seems unlikely to evolve within it over the next six and a half decades, and as 75 percent of the current breeding range is projected to shift the fate of this species may be uncertain.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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