Exploiting Australia's Isoscape: novel methodology to underpin climate change modelling

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. Exploiting Australia's Isoscape: novel methodology to underpin climate change modelling. [Online] (Updated June 24th, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/2972 [Accessed Tuesday 26th of April 2011 01:31:49 AM ].

This project, led by Dr Leo Joseph (CSIRO, Australian National Wildlife collection) is researching new ways of understanding environmental controls on the movements of birds across Australia and how climate change would affect movements of birds.

It will produce an isoscape for the Australian continent (in this case a map of ratios of stable isotopes of Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen and Carbon based on water samples and specimens in museum collections of highly range-restricted species). A second arm of the project will predictively model how the environment, particularly its climatic variables, controls movements of one declining, highly mobile bird species, the White-browed Woodswallow Artamus superciliosus. The two parts of the project, the isoscape and the modelling, will be combined in an analysis of the movements of White-browed Woodswallows over the 20th Century. The localities and dates of museum specimens will be the starting point of this analysis.

The results should inform conservation and management of White-browed Woodswallows and ultimately many other species to which the same protocol can be applied particularly in terms of climate change mitigation.

Project Objectives

Describe the Australian continent’s isoscapes for C, N, H and O stable isotopes and test whether it has geographically structured variation suitable for tracking origin and movements of highly mobile fauna.
Test hypotheses of how the White-browed Woodswallow (Artamus superciliosus; WBWS) responds to rainfall events in the continent’s interior and south-east corner, the latter being its breeding grounds, using isotopic analyses of feathers and/or claws in museum collections and databases of WBWS occurrence and historical climatic data.
Expand item 2 into a Model Case Study in a single species, WBWS, to predict future effects of anthropogenic climate change.