Utilizing occupancy-detection models with opportunistic data to detect climate-driven changes in communities

Background/Question/Methods

Nowhere on the planet is climate change occurring faster than at high latitudes. Unfortunately, much of these regions are understudied and undersampled for insect taxa, which can act as early indicators of warming temperatures. What data do exist largely come from museum specimens and community science programs. Here, we demonstrate an application of occupancy-detection modeling to these datasets in order to reconstruct historical butterfly occurrence across the region and examine the effect of warming winter conditions on butterfly occupancy.

Results/Conclusions

This study represents the first ever examination of the impacts of climate change on high-latitude butterflies across the continent. We found that rising temperatures contributed to an outcome of ecological "winners" and "losers" favoring warm-adapted species over their high-latitude, cold-adapted counterparts. We validate these results through a separate simulation study which demonstrates that the occupancy-detection framework is suitable for recapturing actual trends of biological communities when applied to museum data.