Developing spatial models to guide conservation of grassland birds in the U.S. Northern Great Plains

ABSTRACT Conservation of bird populations is increasingly focused on landscapes. We combined data collected in 2005–2011 from 16,250 North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) survey points with local and remotely sensed environmental data to model the distribution of 7 grassland bird species in the Northern Great Plains of the United States. We analyzed data at the survey point level, which is consistent with the scale of conservation treatments that we apply, and avoided information loss caused by pooling data at the BBS route level. By accounting for observer effects, nesting of survey points within routes, and sequence of survey points, we accommodated BBS survey design, refined estimates of important habitat predictors, improved model fit, and reduced or eliminated positive spatial autocorrelation in model residuals. The predictive power of models was greatly increased by including variables that characterized annual and long-term precipitation, as well as local land cover attributes not available fro...