Assessing migration patterns inPasserina cirisusing the world’s bird collections as an aggregated resource

Abstract

Natural history museum collections (NHCs) represent a rich and largely untapped source of data on demography and population movements. NHC specimen records can be corrected to a crude measure of collecting effort and reflect relative population densities with a method known as abundance indices. We plotted abundance index values from georeferenced NHC data in a 12-month series for the new world migratory passerine Passerina ciris across its molting and wintering range in Mexico and Central America. We illustrated a statistically significant change in abundance index values across regions and months that suggests a quasi-circular movement around its non-breeding range, and used enhanced vegetation index (EVI) analysis of remote sensing plots to demonstrate non-random association of specimen record abundance with areas of high primary productivity. We demonstrated how abundance indices from NHC specimen records can be applied to infer previously unknown migratory behavior, and be integrated with remote sensing data to provide a deeper understanding of demography and behavioral ecology across time and space.

Resource tracking within and across continents in long-distance bird migrants

“…Migratory animals need to fit their annual schedule to the seasonally available resources ( 48 ). We built a simple, coarse-scale simulation framework to investigate whether the observed schedules were optimal with regard to greenness, surplus greenness, or change in greenness compared to an assumption of no optimization ( 49 ). The level at which birds select their habitat is not reflected in the available climate data, and favorable conditions could easily exist locally.…”

Despotic aggression in pre-moulting painted buntings

“…Abundance indices, based on the aggregate record of collecting in Mexico, suggest that the huge numbers of painted buntings that moult in coastal northwest Mexico continue south and east, following the greening of habitats around Mexico during winter. After moulting, buntings move down the west coast of Mexico, then spill over the transvolcanic belt in winter, and migrate up the east coast of Mexico in spring [14].…”

Inferring microevolution from museum collections and resampling: lessons learned fromCepaea

“…Natural history collections are exceptional in that they contain “raw data”—the actual specimens, and not only records associated with specimens ( Schilthuizen et al, 2015 ), and they often date back 100 years or even more. Their value is increasingly recognized ( Holmes et al, 2016 ; Linck et al, 2016 ), but they remain a largely untapped resource. Among museum collections, mollusks have a prominent place.…”