Monthly Distributions of Gouldian Finch (Erythrura gouldiae) in Northern Australia, CTBCC, Far North Queensland Rainforest SuperSite, 1950-2011

Brief description

Contextual data for the FNQ Rainforest Supersite.

This is the monthly distributions of Gouldian Finch (Erythrura gouldiae) in Australia (https://research.jcu.edu.au/researchdata/default/detail/8a37d7d34217a877947f6b88252d0582/). The monthly times time steps were created using the methods defined in Reside et al (2010).

Over 14 million occurrence records of 950+ Australian bird species were collated across the period 1950 to 2011 from personal, public and institutional databases. Only species with >20 unique spatiotemporal records were used for modelling. Daily precipitation and temperature minima and maxima from 1950 until 2011 at a 0.05° grid scale were accessed from the Australian Water Availability Project (AWAP -- http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/) (Jones et al 2007, Grant et al 2008). From this, we calculated annual mean temperature, temperature seasonality, max and min monthly temperature, annual precipitation, precipitation seasonality, and precipitation of the wettest and driest quarters at time lags of three, six, nine and twelve months previous to each month that a bird was recorded within the period 1950 to 2011. However, initial models and work reported in Reside et al (2010), we only used the 12 month time lag.

Species distribution models were run using the presence-only modelling program Maxent (Phillips et al 2006). Maxent uses species presence records to statistically relate species occurrence to environmental variables on the principle of maximum entropy. The model weather data consisted of each unique combination of month, year, latitude and longitude of each bird sighting, and the corresponding weather for each relevant time period. All default settings were used except for background point allocation. We used a target group background (Phillips & Dudik 2008) to remove any spatial or temporal sampling bias in the modelling exercise.