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.
This is one of our most versatile sandpipers, breeding in diverse aquatic habitats and wintering widely across the southern U.S. Audubon's climate model forecasts a 57 percent loss of current summer range, with general northward drifts, but unevenly partitioned between summer and winter: wintertime areas of climatic suitability are predicted to more than double, while climatic suitability in summer may cause a slight decrease in the overall availability of nesting habitat. The complex mating systems of the Spotted Sandpiper have been shown to vary with climate and latitude, and it remains to be seen whether this bird’s courtship biology will be able to evolve in response to a northward migration of the breeding range.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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