Riparian Landbird Priority Areas - Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta - Point Blue [ds3067]

This is one of 3 raster geotiff layers in the larger data set "Spatial prioritization for bird conservation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta". This dataset was developed by Point Blue Conservation Science for a project funded through the Proposition 1 Delta Water Quality and Ecosystem Restoration Program administered by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife titled "Trade-offs and Co-benefits of Landscape Change Scenarios on Bird Communities and Ecosystem Services in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta (Grant Agreement Number Q1996022). This layer represents the result of a spatial prioritization analysis conducted on the predicted distributions of 9 species of riparian landbirds during the breeding season (see related dataset "Predicted probability of riparian landbird distributions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta"), which are in turn based on species distribution models developed from thousands of bird surveys and then applied to a recent representation of the land cover and land use in the Delta in 2018 (see related dataset: "Baseline and projected future land use and land cover in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta"). See Dybala et al. (In review) for additional details on the development, assumptions, and limitations of these analyses and the underlying species distribution models. Briefly, the spatial prioritization analysis consisted of using Zonation software (v5) with the caz1 algorithm to analyze the set of riparian landbird distributions. The results represent the priority ranking of pixels in the Delta by their overall relative value, giving equal weight to each species. From these results, Priority Bird Conservation Areas were defined as the top 5% of pixels and combined with results for waterbirds (see related dataset "Priority Bird Conservation Areas in Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta"). However, the decisions to give each species equal weight and to use the top 5% as a threshold for inclusion as a Priority Bird Conservation Area were arbitrary, and could be further refined by establishing clearer target species and conservation objectives for birds in the Delta. The individual priority ranks provided here can facilitate exploration of other threshold values.

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