Assessing migration patterns in Passerina ciris using the world's bird collections as an aggregated resource.

Ethan Linck,Adolfo G Navarro-Sigüenza,Eli S Bridge,Jonah M Duckles,Sievert Rohwer

doi:10.7717/peerj.1871

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.

Highlights

Natural history museum collections (NHCs) represent a rich and largely untapped source of data on demography, behavioral ecology, and population movements (Ricklefs, 1997; Krosby & Rohwer, 2010; Suarez & Tsutsui, 2004)
Housed in museums and herbaria worldwide, NHCs are unique among extant biological datasets in their breadth and depth, and they lack some of the biases intrinsic to data collected for a specific research goal
We found a statistically significant change in abundance index values across regions and months that suggests a quasi-circular movement around its non-breeding range, and we linked this movement pattern to the phenology of plant growth in Mexico as determined by the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) of primary productivity

Summary

Introduction

Natural history museum collections (NHCs) represent a rich and largely untapped source of data on demography, behavioral ecology, and population movements (Ricklefs, 1997; Krosby & Rohwer, 2010; Suarez & Tsutsui, 2004). Housed in museums and herbaria worldwide, NHCs are unique among extant biological datasets in their breadth and depth, and they lack some of the biases intrinsic to data collected for a specific research goal. How to cite this article Linck et al (2016), Assessing migration patterns in Passerina ciris using the world’s bird collections as an aggregated resource. NHCs have traditionally been used to assess biogeographic range changes (Boakes et al, 2010), phenological shifts (Robbirt et al, 2011), hybridization (Rohwer & Wood, 1998) and evolutionary change in morphology (Hromada et al, 2003). Specimen collections have the potential to shed light on population dynamics, but only if information on collecting effort intrinsic to these data is available

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