Correlative species distribution models are widely used to quantify past shifts in ranges or communities, and to predict future outcomes under ongoing global change. Practitioners confront a wide range of potentially plausible models for ecological dynamics, but most specific applications only consider a narrow set. Here, we clarify that certain model structures can embed restrictive assumptions about key sources of forecast u...

Two controversial tenets of metapopulation biology are whether patch quality and the surrounding matrix are more important to turnover (colonisation and extinction) than biogeography (patch area and isolation) and whether factors governing turnover during equilibrium also dominate nonequilibrium dynamics. We tested both tenets using 18 years of surveys for two secretive wetland birds, black and Virginia rails, during (1) a per...

Transition zones between biomes, also known as ecotones, are areas of pronounced ecological change. They are primarily maintained by abiotic factors and disturbance regimes that could hinder or promote species range shifts in response to climate change. We evaluated how climate change has affected metacommunity dynamics in two adjacent biomes and across their ecotone by resurveying 106 sites that were originally surveyed for a...

The rescue effect in metapopulations hypothesises that less isolated patches are unlikely to go extinct because recolonisation may occur between breeding seasons (‘recolonisation rescue’), or immigrants may sufficiently bolster population size to prevent extinction altogether (‘demographic rescue’). These mechanisms have rarely been demonstrated directly, and most evidence of the rescue effect is from relationships between iso...

Understanding how metapopulations persist in dynamic working landscapes requires assessing the behaviors of key actors that change patches as well as intrinsic factors driving turnover. Coupled human and natural systems ( CHANS ) research uses a multidisciplinary approach to identify the key actors, processes, and feedbacks that drive metapopulation and landscape dynamics. We describe a framework for modeling metapopulations i...

Climate and land‐use changes are thought to be the greatest threats to biodiversity, but few studies have directly measured their simultaneous impacts on species distributions. We used a unique historic resource—early 20th‐century bird surveys conducted by Joseph Grinnell and colleagues—paired with contemporary resurveys a century later to examine changes in bird distributions in California's Central Valley, one of the most in...

A growing body of literature seeks to explain variation in range shifts using species’ ecological and life‐history traits, with expectations that shifts should be greater in species with greater dispersal ability, reproductive potential, and ecological generalization. Despite strong theoretical support for species’ traits as predictors of range shifts, empirical evidence from contemporary range shift studies remains limited in...

Understanding recent biogeographic responses to climate change is fundamental for improving our predictions of likely future responses and guiding conservation planning at both local and global scales. Studies of observed biogeographic responses to 20th century climate change have principally examined effects related to ubiquitous increases in temperature – collectively termed a warming fingerprint. Although the importance of...

Although there are numerous examples of individual species moving up in elevation and poleward in latitude in response to 20th century climate change, how communities have responded is less well understood and requires fully accounting for changes in species‐specific detectability over time, which has been neglected in past studies. We use a hierarchical Bayesian occupancy model to examine bird species richness change and turn...

Recent historic abundance is an elusive parameter of great importance for conserving endangered species and understanding the pre‐anthropogenic state of the biosphere. The number of studies that have used population genetic theory to estimate recent historic abundance from contemporary levels of genetic diversity has grown rapidly over the last two decades. Such assessments often yield unexpectedly large estimates of historic...

Projected effects of climate change on animal distributions primarily focus on consequences of temperature and largely ignore impacts of altered precipitation. While much evidence supports temperature‐driven range shifts, there is substantial heterogeneity in species' responses that remains poorly understood. We resampled breeding ranges of birds across three elevational transects in the S ierra N evada M ountains, USA , that...

We examined how interactions between an individual's phenotype and its environment affect natal dispersal at multiple scales and the effects on lifetime reproductive success using a 22‐year study of green‐rumped parrotlets ( Forpus passerinus ). Dispersal increased or decreased lifetime reproductive success depending upon an individual's natal environment and phenotype. Many of the phenotypic traits and environmental condition...

Genetic assignment methods provide an appealing approach for characterizing dispersal patterns on ecological time scales, but require sufficient genetic differentiation to accurately identify migrants and a large enough sample size of migrants to, for example, compare dispersal between sexes or age classes. We demonstrate that assignment methods can be rigorously used to characterize dispersal patterns in a marbled murrelet (...

Skewed sex ratios – operational (OSR) and Adult (ASR) ‐ arise from sexual differences in reproductive behaviours and adult survival rates due to the cost of reproduction. However, skewed sex‐ratio at birth, sex‐biased dispersal and immigration, and sexual differences in juvenile mortality may also contribute. We present a framework to decompose the roles of demographic traits on sex ratios using perturbation analyses of two‐se...