Professor @ UW | ecologist | freshwater | consumer of flat whites & craft 🍺 | gentle 🐟 squeezer | 🇨🇦 | EiC Water Biology and Biosecurity | AE @ESA Frontiers and Eco Apps | www.oldenfish.com | Views are my own ✊
Julian Olden
Wow, this is utterly insane and really sad for those of us dedicated to 100% human-generated science.
We combined aquatic insect data from >140,000 river sites with over 83 million bird surveys from eBird. After accounting for spatiotemporal proximity & survey effort during the insect-emergence & bird-breeding period, the final dataset had 14,177 locations & over 2 million bird obs for 288 species.
This study offers strong evidence that a mechanism long established in small-scale analyses - namely, emergent aquatic insects fueling terrestrial predators - scales up to continental biodiversity patterns. Thus, protecting rivers is also a strategy for sustaining birds and their ecosystems.
