Hot in the city: Impacts of climate variability and urban landscape change on birds.

Conserving wildlife communities across shifting landscapes requires an understanding of how dynamic environmental factors that shape habitat vary across space and time. Declines in wildlife species diversity due to urbanization and changing climate conditions are widely documented. However, the combined future impacts of these multiple environmental stressors on wildlife communities remain unclear, partially due to the lack of data at the spatiotemporal scales necessary for predicting how wildlife with diverse habitat needs respond to long-term anthropogenic change. Furthermore, wildlife community dynamics have uncertain implications for urban biodiversity conservation, as sensitivity to interacting environmental conditions can vary among species of conservation concern. To address these gaps, we ask: how have temporal interactions between changes and variability in urbanization, temperature, and vegetation impacted bird species? We analyzed the spatiotemporal dynamics of avian habitat use by combining a novel autoregressive multi-species occupancy modeling approach with long-term datasets of environmental conditions and avian occurrence (spring season; 2001-2016) collected across the rapidly developing arid metropolitan region of Phoenix, Arizona, USA. On average, bird occupancy was negatively associated with urbanization, with birds less likely to use any sites with less green vegetation or use highly urbanized sites when seasonal average minimum air temperatures were higher. However, these relationships varied widely within the community. Species that tended to utilize urbanized areas responded more positively to increases in temperature and vegetation than species that typically avoided urbanized areas, the latter of which included many species of national and state-level conservation concern. Our findings demonstrate how temporally explicit analyses of long-term data can facilitate the prediction of changes in species' habitat use in response to interacting climate and landscape changes.