climate change and song birds

"How can I miss you if you won't go away" - old blues song.

Mike Conroy touched on the implications of climate change for song bird conservation - clearly this is in the adaptation to climate change situation, because the cat is out of the bag, frankly.

His key point is that we want to avoid spending large amounts on things that don't work, and that we need to think about many different scales - particularly large scales. He had some nice BBS maps showing how some of the long range migrants are decreasing at the southern end of their ranges, and increasing at the northern end of the range.

Some nice quotes:

"We can deal with epistemic uncertainty ... we predict from different models, do the averaging thing ... this is all in the book."

"Data in the short term cannot discriminate between different hypotheses" when one involves a tipping point.

"We might need to go back to the Walterian model rather than the incremental one we've been preaching for the last 20 years."