Frank A. La Sorte

Frank A. La Sorte
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Frank verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Yale University | YU · Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Ph.D.

About

131
Publications
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Publications

Publications (131)
Preprint
Full-text available
1. Urban areas are foci for the introduction of non-native plant species, and they often act as launching sites for invasions into the wider environment. Although interest in biological invasions in urban areas is growing rapidly, and the extent and complexity of problems associated with invasions in these systems have increased, data on the compos...
Article
Full-text available
Some predators depend heavily on one or a few prey types, and others have exceptionally broad diets. It is unclear how this diet variation arises. Here, we demonstrate a strong link between diet species richness and Shannon entropy of prey frequencies (a diet diversity spectrum) for a globally distributed group of apex predators–raptors. For many r...
Article
Full-text available
Avian population sizes fluctuate and change over vast spatial scales, but the mechanistic underpinnings remain poorly understood. A key question is whether spatial and annual variation in avian population dynamics is driven primarily by variation in breeding season recruitment or by variation in overwinter survival. We present a method using large‐...
Article
Full-text available
East Asian herbivorous waterfowl intensively use farmland in spring, next to their natural habitat. Accordingly, they might have expanded their migration strategy from merely tracking the green wave of newly emerging vegetation to also incorporating the availability of post-harvest agricultural seeds (here dubbed the seed wave). However, if and how...
Article
Full-text available
Every night during spring and autumn, the mass movement of migratory birds redistributes bird abundances found on the ground during the day. However, the connection between the magnitude of nocturnal migration and the resulting change in diurnal abundance remains poorly quantified. If departures and landings at the same location are balanced throug...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Understanding and addressing the global biodiversity crisis requires ecological information compiled continuously from across the globe. Data from citizen science initiatives are useful for quantifying species' ecological niches and geographical distributions but can be difficult to apply towards biodiversity monitoring. The presence of fixed g...
Preprint
In migratory species, the temporal phases of the annual cycle are intrinsically linked to seasonally shifting geographic ranges. Despite intense interest in the annual cycle ecology of migration, a synthetic understanding of the relationship between the biogeography and phenology of seasonal migration remains elusive. Here, we interrogate the spati...
Article
Full-text available
The green-upof vegetation in spring brings a pulse of food resources that many animals track during migration. However, green-up phenology is changing with climate change, posing an immense challenge for species that time their migrations to coincide with these resource pulses. We evaluated changes in green-up phenology from 2002 to 2021 in relatio...
Article
Aim A unique risk faced by nocturnally migrating birds is the disorienting influence of artificial light at night (ALAN). ALAN originates from anthropogenic activities that can generate other forms of environmental pollution, including the emission of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ). PM 2.5 concentrations can display strong seasonal variation who...
Article
Full-text available
When prioritizing regions for conservation protection, decisions are often based on the principle that a single large reserve should support more species than several small reserves of the same total area (SLOSS). This principle remains a central paradigm in conservation planning despite conflicting empirical evidence and methodological concerns. I...
Article
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Species declines and extinctions characterize the Anthropocene. Determining species vulnerability to decline, and where and how to mitigate threats, are paramount for effective conservation. We hypothesized that species with shared ecological traits also share threats, and therefore may experience similar population trends. Here, we used a Bayesian...
Article
Full-text available
The audiovisual experience of observing birds in cities provides numerous benefits to residents, but their diversity is endangered by urbanization. Although the magnitude of the surface urban heat island effect (hereafter SUHI) has grown in recent years, its impact on bird diversity has not been adequately investigated. Here, we calculate the SUHI...
Chapter
How and where species are distributed across the Earth is based in part on the relationships that exist between species and the habitats that they occur in. Understanding these relationships has broad applications when studying urban biodiversity. Two disciplines that provide the tools and theory to understand patterns of urban biodiversity are lan...
Article
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Cities can host significant biological diversity. Yet, urbanisation leads to the loss of habitats, species, and functional groups. Understanding how multiple taxa respond to urbanisation globally is essential to promote and conserve biodiversity in cities. Using a dataset encompassing six terrestrial faunal taxa (amphibians, bats, bees, birds, cara...
Article
Full-text available
The conversion of forest to agriculture is considered one of the greatest threats to avian biodiversity, yet how species respond to habitat modification throughout the annual cycle remains unknown. We examined whether forest bird associations with agricultural habitats vary throughout the year, and if species traits influence these relationships. U...
Article
Full-text available
Cities have classically been viewed as biologically impoverished, homogenized, and simplified systems that harbor low value for biodiversity. However, recent work has demonstrated that cities are critical ecological systems that provide important services to humanity and biodiversity. Cities can play vital roles in conserving biodiversity as well a...
Preprint
Full-text available
East Asian herbivorous waterfowl intensively use farmland in spring, next to their natural habitat. Accordingly, they might have expanded their migration strategy from merely tracking the green wave of newly emerging vegetation to also incorporating the availability of post-harvest agricultural seeds (here dubbed the seed wave). However, if and how...
Article
Full-text available
Protected areas are a key instrument for conservation. Despite this, they are vulnerable to risks associated with weak governance, land‐use intensification, and climate change. We used a novel hierarchical optimization approach to identify priority areas for expanding the global protected area system that explicitly accounted for such risks while m...
Preprint
Full-text available
Protected areas are a key instrument for conservation. Despite this, they are vulnerable to risks associated with weak governance, land use intensification, and climate change. Using a novel hierarchical optimization approach, we identified priority areas for expanding the global protected area system to explicitly account for such risks whilst max...
Article
Anthropogenic activities generate different forms of environmental pollution, including artificial light at night (ALAN) and airborne toxic chemicals (ATCs). Nocturnally migrating birds are attracted to ALAN during migration and if ALAN occurs in unison with ATC, the chances of ground-level ATC contamination occurring at stopover sites could increa...
Article
Full-text available
The presence of migratory birds on islands results in seasonal variation in species richness. These patterns and their geographical correlates within the context of island biogeography theory have not been examined. We used 21 years of bird observations on 690 islands from eBird to determine how seasonal species richness estimates vary as a functio...
Article
Full-text available
Since the 1990s, recognition of urban biodiversity research has increased steadily. Knowledge of how ecological communities respond to urban pressures can assist in addressing global questions related to biodiversity. To assess the state of this research field in meeting this aim, we conducted a systematic review of the urban biodiversity literatur...
Article
Full-text available
Aim: Measuring avian migration can prove challenging given the spatial scope and the diversity of species involved. No one monitoring technique provides all the pertinent measures needed to capture this macroscale phenomenon - emphasizing the need for data integration. Migration phenology is a key metric characterizing large-scale migration dynami...
Article
Full-text available
Artificial light at night (ALAN) is adversely affecting natural systems worldwide, including the disorienting influence of ALAN on nocturnally migrating birds. Understanding how ALAN trends are developing across spe-cies' seasonal distributions will inform mitigation efforts, such as Lights Out programs. Here, we intersect ALAN annual trend estimat...
Article
Full-text available
Species-specific population estimates are fundamental for many aspects of ecology, evolution, and conservation, yet they are lacking for most species. Aiming to fill this gap, Callaghan et al. (1) estimated global bird population sizes by modeling the relationship between eBird reporting rates and independent estimates and extrapolating globally. W...
Article
Full-text available
Aim Artificial light at night (ALAN) and roads are known threats to nocturnally migrating birds. How associations with ALAN and roads are defined in combination for these species at the population level across the full annual cycle has not been explored. Location Western Hemisphere. Methods We estimated range‐wide exposure, predictor importance a...
Article
Aim Two important environmental hazards for nocturnally migrating birds are artificial light at night (ALAN) and air pollution, with ambient fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) considered to be especially harmful. Nocturnally migrating birds are attracted to ALAN during seasonal migration, which could increase exposure to PM 2.5 . Here, we examine PM...
Article
Aim Animal migration is often explained as the result of resource tracking in seasonally dynamic environments. Therefore, resource availability should influence both the distributions of migratory animals and their seasonal abundance. We examined the relationship between primary productivity and the spatio‐temporal distributions of migratory birds...
Article
Nurseries play an important role providing trees for a variety of managed environments including urban forests. The diversity of urban forests and forest restoration projects are influenced by nursery species availability, and as such, there is a need to better understand tree species diversity at nurseries. We collected tree species lists from 75...
Article
Full-text available
As human and automated sensor networks collect increasingly massive volumes of animal observations, new opportunities have arisen to use these data to infer or track species movements. Sources of broad scale occurrence datasets include crowdsourced databases, such as eBird and iNaturalist, weather surveillance radars, and passive automated sensors...
Article
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Aircraft collisions with birds span the entire history of human aviation, including fatal collisions during some of the first powered human flights. Much effort has been expended to reduce such collisions, but increased knowledge about bird movements and species occurrence could dramatically improve decision support and proactive measures to reduce...
Article
Full-text available
Anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and duration of extreme climate events, including extreme heat events (EHE) and extreme cold events (ECE). How the frequency and duration of both EHE and ECE have changed over time within both terrestrial and marine environments globally has not been fully explored. Here, we use detrended dail...
Article
Rapid urbanization and the global loss of biodiversity necessitate the development of a research agenda that addresses knowledge gaps in urban ecology that will inform policy, management, and conservation. To advance this goal, we present six topics to pursue in urban biodiversity research: the socioeconomic and social-ecological drivers of biodive...
Article
Aim: Island biotas face an array of unique challenges under global change. Monitoring and research efforts, however, have been hindered by the large number of islands, their broad distribution and geographical isolation. Global citizen-science initiatives have the potential to address these deficiencies. Here, we determine how the eBird citizen-sci...
Article
Urban areas often contain large numbers of migratory bird species during seasonal migration, many of which are nocturnal migrants. How artificial light at night (ALAN) and urban landcover are associated with the diurnal occurrence of nocturnal migrants within urban areas across seasons has not been explored. Here, we use eBird bird occurrence infor...
Article
Full-text available
The seasonal movement of animals has been linked to seasonal variation in ecological productivity, and it has been hypothesized that primary consumers synchronize migration with vegetation phenology. Within temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, herbivorous bird species often track the phenology of vegetation greenness during spring migratio...
Article
Urban green spaces (UGS) often support diverse bird assemblages. Current evidence suggests large UGS that are circular in shape and contain abundant tree canopy cover will support more bird species independent of UGS isolation. Here, we use bird occurrence information from the eBird citizen-science database over an 18-year period (2002-2019) to est...
Article
The noise filter hypothesis predicts that species using higher sound frequencies should be more tolerant of noise pollution, because anthropogenic noise is more intense at low frequencies. Recent work analysed continental‐scale data on anthropogenic noise across the USA and found that passerine species inhabiting more noise‐polluted areas do not ha...
Article
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Climate change induced phenological shifts in primary productivity result in trophic mismatches for many organisms1–4, with broad implications for ecosystem structure and function. For birds that have a synchronized timing of migration with resource availability, the likelihood that trophic mismatches may generate a phenological response in migrati...
Article
Stemming biodiversity loss requires strategic conservation guided by well articulated targets, whether they be proactive (e.g., protect biodiverse areas) or reactive (e.g., protect threatened species). Both types of targets can be effective, but there are trade-offs, especially for broadly distributed taxa such as migratory species, a group for whi...
Article
Full-text available
Measuring the completeness of survey inventories created by citizen‐science initiatives can identify the strengths and shortfalls in our knowledge of where species occur geographically. Here, we use occurrence information from eBird to measure the survey completeness of the world's birds in this database at three temporal resolutions and four spati...
Article
Full-text available
Aim: Anthropogenic noise pollution (ANP) is a globally invasive phenomenon impacting natural systems, but most research has occurred at local scales with few species. We investigated continental‐scale breeding season associations with ANP for 322 bird species to test whether small‐scale predictions related to breeding habitat, migratory behaviour,...
Article
Large networks of weather radars are comprehensive instruments for studying bird migration. For example, the US WSR‐88D network covers the entire continental US and has archived data since the 1990s. The data can quantify both broad and fine‐scale bird movements to address a range of migration ecology questions. However, the problem of automaticall...
Article
Full-text available
Many species of migratory birds have evolved the ability to migrate at night, and the recent and rapid expansion of artificial light at night has markedly altered the nighttime sky through which they travel. Migrating birds regularly pass through heavily illuminated landscapes, and bright lights affect avian orientation. But risks to migrating bird...
Article
High predation risk can favor rapid offspring development at the expense of offspring quality. Impacts of rapid development on phenotypic quality should be most readily expressed in traits that minimize fitness costs. We hypothesize that ephemeral traits that are replaced or repaired after a short period of life might express trade-offs in quality...
Article
To better understand the ecological implications of global climate change for species that display geographically and seasonally dynamic life‐history strategies, we need to determine where and when novel climates are projected to first emerge. Here, we use a multivariate approach to estimate time of emergence (ToE) of novel climates based on three...
Article
Quantifying the timing and intensity of migratory movements is imperative for understanding impacts of changing landscapes and climates on migratory bird populations. Billions of birds migrate in the Western Hemisphere, but accurately estimating the population size of one migratory species, let alone hundreds, presents numerous obstacles. Here, we...
Article
Current climate models and observations indicate that atmospheric circulation is being affected by global climate change. To assess how these changes may affect nocturnally migrating bird populations, we need to determine how current patterns of wind assistance at migration altitudes will be enhanced or reduced under future atmospheric conditions....
Article
Full-text available
Avian migration is one of Earth's largest processes of biomass transport, involving billions of birds. We estimated continental biomass flows of nocturnal avian migrants across the contiguous United States using a network of 143 weather radars. We show that, relative to biomass leaving in autumn, proportionally more biomass returned in spring acros...
Article
Aim Urbanization broadly affects the phylogenetic and functional diversity of natural communities through a variety of processes including habitat loss and the introduction of non‐native species. Due to the challenge of acquiring direct measurements, these effects have been studied primarily using “space‐for‐time” substitution where spatial urbaniz...
Article
The migratory patterns of birds have been the focus of ecologists for millennia. What behavioural traits underlie these remarkably consistent movements? Addressing this question is central to advancing our understanding of migratory flight strategies and requires the integration of information across levels of biological organisation, e.g. species...
Article
Full-text available
Recent advancements in information technology and data acquisition have created both new research opportunities and new challenges for using big data in ornithology. We provide an overview of the past, present, and future of big data in ornithology, and explore the rewards and risks associated with their application. Structured data resources (e.g....
Article
Determining the implications of global climate change for highly mobile taxa such as migratory birds requires a perspective that is spatiotemporally comprehensive and ecologically relevant. Here, we document how passerine bird species that migrate within the Western Hemisphere (n = 77) are associated with projected novel climates across the full an...
Article
Full-text available
Anthropogenic activities have weakened biogeographical barriers to dispersal, thereby promoting the introduction, establishment and spread of alien species outside their native ranges. Several studies have identified a number of biological and ecological drivers that contribute to the establishment of plant species in the invaded range. One long-te...
Article
Full-text available
Species migratory patterns have typically been studied through individual observations and historical records. In this work, we adopt a data driven approach to modelling the presence of the North American Tree Swallow, Tachycineta bicolor, throughout the Eastern United States, using data collected through the eBird project at Cornell University's L...
Preprint
Bird species' migratory patterns have typically been studied through individual observations and historical records. In recent years however, the eBird citizen science project, which solicits observations from thousands of bird watchers around the world, has opened the door for a data-driven approach to understanding the large-scale geographical mo...
Article
Understanding the susceptibility of highly mobile taxa such as migratory birds to global change requires information on geographic patterns of occurrence across the annual cycle. Neotropical migrants that breed in North America and winter in Central America occur in high concentrations on their non-breeding grounds where they spend the majority of...
Article
The spatial extent and intensity of artificial light at night (ALAN) has increased worldwide through the growth of urban environments. There is evidence that nocturnally migrating birds are attracted to ALAN, and there is evidence that nocturnally migrating bird populations are more likely to occur in urban areas during migration, especially in the...
Chapter
Full-text available
The rapid urbanization of the world has profound effects on global biodiversity, and urbanization has been counted among the processes contributing to the homogenization of the world’s biota. However, there are few generalities of the patterns and drivers of urban birds and even fewer global comparative studies. Comparable methodologies and dataset...
Article
A number of terrestrial bird species that breed in North America cross the Atlantic Ocean during autumn migration when travelling to their non‐breeding grounds in the Caribbean or South America. When conducting oceanic crossings, migratory birds tend to associate with mild or supportive winds, whose speed and direction may change under global warmi...
Article
Full-text available
The majority of humanity now lives in cities or towns, with this proportion expected to continue increasing for the foreseeable future. As novel ecosystems, urban areas offer an ideal opportunity to examine multi-scalar processes involved in community assembly as well as the role of human activities in modulating environmental drivers of biodiversi...
Article
Aim Seasonal migration is a common strategy used by terrestrial birds that breed in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Evidence suggests that long‐distance migrants have limited flexibility in migratory behaviour during the onset of migration but greater flexibility during the migration journey. Here, we examine how two geographical fact...
Article
Full-text available
The majority of humanity now lives in cities or towns, with this proportion expected to continue increasing for the foreseeable future. As novel ecosystems, urban areas offer an ideal opportunity to examine multi-scalar processes involved in community assembly as well as the role of human activities in modulating environmental drivers of biodiversi...
Article
Full-text available
Food availability is known to influence parental care and mating systems in passerine birds. Altricial chicks make uni-parental care particularly demanding for passerines and parental investment is known to increase with decreasing food availability. We expect this to limit uni-parental passerines to habitats with the most consistent food availabil...
Data
Frugivore Passerines of the World The 561 frugivore passerine bird species considered in the analysis. (PDF)
Data
The passerine taxonomic families considered in the analysis. The passerine taxonomic families considered in the analysis and number of species within each parental care category. (PDF)
Article
Full-text available
Mid-latitude climate extremes are projected to increase in frequency under global climate change. How this may affect migratory bird populations is not well understood. The mid-latitudes of North America experienced an extreme warming event during March 2012 that advanced the spring phenology of ecological productivity, resulting in lower levels of...
Article
Aim Plasticity in migratory and foraging behaviour allows species to exploit dynamic and novel habitats. This is especially important during seasonal transitions as species track shifting environmental resources and potentially associate with a diversity of habitats. Although land cover associations are thought to vary across seasons for many speci...
Article
Full-text available
Migration is a common strategy used by birds that breed in seasonal environments. Selection for greater migration efficiency is likely to be stronger for terrestrial species whose migration strategies require non-stop transoceanic crossings. If multiple species use the same transoceanic flyway, then we expect the migration strategies of these speci...
Article
Full-text available
Wind plays a significant role in the flight altitudes selected by nocturnally migrating birds. At mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, atmospheric conditions are dictated by the polar-front jet stream, whose amplitude increases in the autumn. One consequence for migratory birds is that the region’s prevailing westerly winds become progressivel...