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Geographic redistributions are insufficient to mitigate exposure to climate change in North American birds

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

As climate change accelerates, many species must move poleward or upslope to conserve their environmental niches and limit their exposure. While such geographic redistributions have been extensively reported, an assessment of species’ success in limiting their exposure to novel conditions is missing. Here we report on a method to account for biases in tens of millions of species observations and evaluate how 406 bird species native to the United States and Canada have mitigated their environmental niche loss using geographical redistribution. We find that most redistributions have only been partially effective at mitigating exposure to climate change. Over 20 years, species, on average, have redistributed their summertime ranges by ~0.64° north, averting their expected exposure to warming by ~1.28 °C, which is roughly half the warming they would have experienced if they had remained stationary. Meanwhile, species have only mitigated ~0.47 °C (11% of expected warming) in winter, and nearly all have experienced warming of >2 °C. Species moving the farthest north and possessing traits associated with dispersal have succeeded most in limiting their niche loss. Species’ historical niches are becoming increasingly mismatched with contemporary climates, even in a highly mobile taxon, raising concerns about the ability of other wildlife to persist in a warmer world.

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Fig. 1: Geographic redistributions and niche loss over 20 years of climate change.
Fig. 2: Twenty years of climate change exposure and niche loss across 406 US and Canadian bird species.
Fig. 3: Geographic redistributions mitigated some climate change exposure.
Fig. 4: Migratory behaviour is associated with range redistributions and niche loss.

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Data availability

The data used in this manuscript is available via Map of Life at https://doi.org/10.48600/gwha-6a31. The GBIF data can be downloaded from www.gbif.org. The eBird data can be downloaded from www.ebird.org. The BBS data can be downloaded from https://www.usgs.gov/data/2023-release-north-american-breeding-bird-survey-dataset-1966-2022. The environmental data can be downloaded from CHELSA (https://chelsa-climate.org/) or MODIS (https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod11a1v006/). The AVONET trait data is available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ele.13898.

Code availability

Code for this manuscript is available via Github at https://github.com/jeremy-cohen/changing-seasonal-niches.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Wilshire, K. Chefira, A. Ranipeta, R. Li and the Map of Life team at the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change for implementing the Spatiotemporal Observation Annotation Tool to annotate occurrence data. We thank D. Ellis-Soto, L. Fouda, A. Honda, F. Iannarilli, F. La Sorte, R. Li, J. Makinen, J. Portmann, E. Sauer, S. Sharma, J. Wilshire, K. Winner and S. Yanco for their constructive comments on the manuscript. We thank F. La Sorte for compiling the species-level migration distances. This work was enabled by NASA grants 80NSSC17K0282 and 80NSSC18K0435 to W.J. and was partially supported by the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation in furtherance of the Half-Earth Project.

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  1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jeremy M. Cohen & Walter Jetz

  2. Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jeremy M. Cohen & Walter Jetz

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Both authors devised the ideas for the study and the methodology. J.M.C. compiled and annotated the GBIF data. J.M.C. devised the trend calculation workflow. J.M.C. accessed the functional trait databases and harmonized the phylogenetic information. J.M.C. conducted the statistical analyses and generated the figures. Both authors wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jeremy M. Cohen.

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Supplementary Data 1

Estimates of realized and mitigated niche loss and geographical redistributions between 2000–2020 for all species during summer and winter.

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Cohen, J.M., Jetz, W. Geographic redistributions are insufficient to mitigate exposure to climate change in North American birds. Nat Ecol Evol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02714-7

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