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 species has two populations with distinct life history strategies. On the coastal plain, it prefers pines to nest in. In the interior (the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, for instance), it prefers sycamore trees along rivers. Audubon's climate model projects a 59 percent loss of current summer range by 2080, with much of the suitable climate space having shifted northeast. Whether the trees the bird requires will be available in those areas remains to be seen. Many Yellow-throated Warblers winter in Middle America and the West Indies, so the predicted potential winter expansion in the southeast may be conservative.
Explore more birds threatened by climate change around the country.
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