Abstract Book Abstract Book Virtual joint meeting of the American Ornithological Society (AOS) and the Society of Canadian Ornithologists-Société des ornithologistes du Canada (SCO-SOC) 9-13 August 2021 Table of Contents Symposia presentation abstracts ………………………………..………………….... 3 Contributed oral presentation abstracts ………………………………………….... 63 Virtual poster presentation abstracts ……………………………………………... 163 Version 1.5, 27 July 2021 2021 Joint Virtual Meeting – 2 – AOS & SCO-SOC Symposia Presentation Abstracts Listed alphabetically by last name of first author 2021 Joint Virtual Meeting – 3 – AOS & SCO-SOC Symposia presentation abstracts INLA: A way for ecologists to overcome their worst impulses Evan M. Adams Presenting author: Evan Adams, Biodiversity Research Institute, [email protected] INLA—or Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation—is a horrifying name for an R package, but it gives ecologists access to fast and powerful spatial modeling tools. This package was developed by Thiago Martins, Daniel Simpson, Finn Lindgren and Havard Rue (www.r-inla.org) and is handy because you can account for spatial bias in sampling effort when estimating a spatial pattern. Scientists love collecting data, but that desire does not always lead to a data set appropriate for spatial inference. Quantitative ecologists are often cobbling together imperfect data sets from multiple projects or dealing with semi-structured data that lack formalized sampling designs. In this talk, I’ll show how INLA can account for preferential spatial sampling and how you can significantly improve your spatial modeling analyses without having model runs take days to finish. As an example, I’ll be talking about estimating spatial patterns in mercury exposure across biota in New York State and the factors that influence these patterns. I’ll show you what unbalanced sampling looks like, how to account for its effect, and how to interpret the results. Finally, I’ll wrap things up with the other kinds of spatial models you can implement in INLA so you can decide if this is something worth exploring for your research. dplyr: A useful toolbox for manipulating data Stepfanie M. Aguillon Presenting author: Stepfanie Aguillon, Cornell University, [email protected] Using the free, open-source program R is becoming increasingly common in the sciences, and particularly so in ornithological research. With the wide array of available “packages” that extend the capabilities of R, it can be difficult for ornithologists to identify useful packages for their own research. In this lightning talk, I will discuss ‘dplyr’ a data manipulation package that is part of the tidyverse. dplyr makes manipulating data a breeze! From filtering and summarizing single datasets to joining multiple datasets together, dplyr can do it all! This package is useful both for small and large datasets and represents an easy introduction into coding for new users. Additionally, packages within the tidyverse share an underlying coding grammar, so learning to manipulate data with dplyr allows for an easy transition into many other R packages. I will include example code to jumpstart new R users into manipulating data with dplyr and show how easy it can be to make reproducible code in the tidyverse. Amazonian biogeography from a historical perspective Alexandre Aleixo Presenting author: Alexandre Aleixo, Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, [email protected] The mega-diverse Amazonian lowlands are a central area for discussions on processes that drive biotic diversification as well as those on the modern climate-crisis era given its paramount role as a carbon storage and sink ecosystem. Historically, the study of Amazonian biogeography evolved from documenting the ranges of closely related taxa based on specimens collected throughout the basin, to estimating phylogeographies and phylogenies based on molecular data (mainly DNA sequencing) obtained from tissue samples. While over time, vicariant scenarios of diversification driven by either climate change or river-dynamics have dominated the field as competing alternative hypotheses, more recent analyses have supported them as not mutually exclusive. In fact, a synergistic interaction between climate change and an active geological setting might together account for biotic diversification over Amazonian landscapes, with recent analyses also supporting an important role for dispersal over broad time scales. While these drivers of biotic change seem to have affected consistently all Amazonian environments, the responses of avifaunas associated with distinct habitats such as upland terra-firme, seasonally-flooded, and white-sand forests, as well as savannahs, varied significantly, and are explored in more detail. Despite all conceptual advances experienced by Amazonian biogeography during the past decades, the temporal and spatial contexts of the diversification scenarios favored over time have yet to be tested with more robust (mainly genomic) datasets. The Partners in Flight Focal Species Approach: Using multispecies indicators to inform oak woodland conservation planning and implementation in the Klamath Siskiyou Bioregion of southern Oregon and northern California 2021 Joint Virtual Meeting – 4 – AOS & SCO-SOC Symposia presentation abstracts John D. Alexander, Caitlyn R. Gillespie, Katherine E. Halstead, Jaime L. Stephens, and Sara Evans-Peters Presenting author: John Alexander, Klamath Bird Observatory, [email protected] Partners in Flight (PIF) bird conservation plans set conservation objectives for bird populations and their habitats across North America. Many regional PIF plans also identify suites of focal species that are associated with key habitat features; these birds serve as indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem function. We will demonstrate how PIF focal species can be used to drive conservation planning, implementation, and evaluation by describing how PIF’s focal species approach was used to develop the Klamath Siskiyou Oak Network Strategic Conservation Action Plan (SAP) and how focal species monitoring is being used to ensure SAP implementation progresses within an adaptive management framework. We used a novel species-centered habitat modeling approach to map the predicted distribution of oak focal species in the SAP’s four oak ecosystem targets – oak savanna, oak chaparral, oak woodland, and oak conifer. Specific suites of PIF focal species were identified as key ecological attributes for each target and multi-species occurrence metrics were identified for assessing the current and desired status of each ecosystem target at both local and landscape scales. PIF species prioritizations and conservation objectives were then used to help rank the threats that stress and degrade aspects of the four oak ecosystem targets. Habitat objectives identified for PIF focal species were then used to help develop and prioritize strategies that will be implemented to reduce top ranked threats and improve the status of the ecosystem targets. Now, as the SAP is being implemented within an adaptive management framework, focal species monitoring is being used to measure short- and long-term outcomes to ensure conservation effectiveness. The neural encoding of optic flow differs among bird species with distinct flight modes Andrea H. Gaede, Graham Smyth, Vikram B. Baliga, Cristian Gutierrez-Ibañez, Douglas R. Wylie, and Douglas L. Altshuler Presenting author: Doug Altshuler, University of British Columbia, [email protected] Optic flow is processed in evolutionarily conserved midbrain pathways containing retinal recipient nuclei. In birds, these nuclei are called the lentiformis mesencephali (LM) and the nucleus of the Basal Optic Root (nBOR). A key question is, to what extent are optic flow neurons specialized to species-specific behaviors? Hummingbirds use vision to guide hovering flight and their LM is specialized in two respects: 1) in other tetrapods there is a strong bias for forward visual motion, whereas hummingbirds exhibit no direction bias; 2) hummingbird LM neurons are tightly tuned to faster velocities. We first ask if the hummingbird nBOR has shifted concomitantly in direction and velocity preference. Extracellular recordings from nBOR in hummingbirds, zebra finches, and pigeons revealed no differences in either direction or velocity preferences. However, as with the LM, nBOR neurons in hummingbirds are more tightly tuned to stimulus velocity. We next ask if the difference in velocity tuning was due to preference for lower spatial frequencies, higher temporal frequencies, or both. Hummingbird LM neurons were tuned to much lower spatial frequencies moving at much faster velocities. In contrast, differences among species in the spatiotemporal tuning preference of nBOR neurons were modest. However, in both LM and nBOR, hummingbird optic flow neurons were more tightly tuned in the spatiotemporal domain. These surprising changes to optic flow encoding are consistent with the behavior of hover-feeding in dense foliage, in which self-motion would result in fast movements of large images on the retina. Monitoring disturbance and fragmentation of the endemic Caribbean pine forests of Andros, home of the critically endangered Bahama Oriole Janine M. Antalffy, Michael G. Rowley, Scott B. Johnson, Shelley Cant-Woodside, Ethan H. Freid, Kevin E. Omland, and Matthew E. Fagan Presenting author: Janine Antalffy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, [email protected] The islands of Andros in The Bahamas, like