Projected Effects of Climate Change on Birds at U.S. National Parks | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The grant opportunity titled "Projected Effects of Climate Change on Birds at U.S. National Parks" is a National Park Service (NPS) cooperative agreement intended to translate a major, continent-wide bird and climate modeling effort by the National Audubon Society into practical, park-scale information that can support management, monitoring, and public communication in U.S. national parks. The underlying scientific foundation is Audubon's recent analysis of climate change impacts on North American birds (Langham et al. 2015), which combined long-running community science datasets (the Audubon Christmas Bird Count for winter distributions and the North American Breeding Bird Survey for summer/breeding distributions) with detailed historical climate information and future climate projections. Using those inputs, Audubon produced statistical models estimating both current and future bird ranges across the continental United States and Canada, focusing on species with enough data to build robust models. In total, the modeling effort covered 588 species, including 503 modeled for winter and 475 modeled for summer.

A central finding from the Audubon analysis, as highlighted in the opportunity description, is that climate change is expected to reshape bird diversity differently by season. The projections suggest that winter species richness will increase across much of the continent, while summer species richness is projected to decline over much of the conterminous United States and increase more strongly at higher latitudes. For national parks, this matters because parks often protect important bird communities year-round, and seasonal changes in which species are present (and how suitable conditions are for them) can affect everything from habitat management priorities to visitor experience and interpretive messaging.

What the NPS is specifically supporting through this cooperative agreement is the step from broad, continental projections to actionable, local-scale summaries that park managers can use. The opportunity describes an approach that takes Audubon's suite of climate suitability projections and summarizes them at local management scales to show how relative suitability for individual species (or groups of species) changes over time and across multiple future climate scenarios. This method was developed for Acadia National Park (Fisichelli et al. 2014) and has already been applied in a limited way at Voyageurs National Park for two species, serving as proof of concept. The goal is to generalize and apply that park-scale framing more widely so that each park can better understand which birds are likely to gain or lose suitable climate conditions locally, when those changes may become noticeable, and how consistent the results are across different plausible climate futures.

The opportunity also ties the modeling products directly to NPS monitoring and decision-making needs. Birds are described as fundamental resources at many parks, and a large share of NPS natural resource parks track bird population trends as a "vital sign" under the NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program. Specifically, the notice states that 189 of 270 parks (70 percent) monitor bird trends. By providing near-future climate suitability projections, the project would help parks interpret what they are already seeing in monitoring data, generate and test hypotheses about why certain populations are increasing or declining, and anticipate changes before they are fully evident in long-term trend data. In practical terms, the projections can inform species-focused planning (for example, identifying birds likely to become climate-stressed within a park), guild-focused strategies (such as grassland, forest interior, or wetland bird assemblages), or habitat-focused management (prioritizing habitat conditions that may buffer climate impacts or accommodate shifting communities).

Beyond internal management and science support, the opportunity emphasizes education and communication. The NPS and Audubon can use these projections to help the public understand how climate change may affect birds that visitors actually observe in parks. Because birds are highly visible and widely appreciated, park-specific projections can be especially effective for interpretation, outreach, and climate education, linking global climate trends to local, relatable wildlife outcomes.

Administratively, this is a discretionary funding opportunity under the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, using a cooperative agreement as the funding instrument, indicating substantial involvement and collaboration between the federal agency and the recipient. The eligible applicant category is limited to nonprofits with 501(c)(3) status (excluding institutions of higher education), and the recipient identified in the description is the National Audubon Society. The notice is explicitly not open for competition: it is a "notification of intent to award without additional competition," and no applications are accepted. The funding opportunity number is P16AS00393, the CFDA number is 15.944, and the activity category is Natural Resources. The expected number of awards is one, with an award ceiling of $54,098, and the opportunity was created on July 26, 2016.

Taken together, the opportunity is essentially about turning an already-completed, large-scale climate and bird distribution modeling effort into park-relevant decision support. It aims to help national parks understand how climate-driven suitability for birds may change within their boundaries, support interpretation of monitoring trends across seasons, and provide clear, place-based information that can guide conservation actions and help visitors grasp the on-the-ground implications of climate change for familiar bird species.

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