Population dynamic population delineation in North American birds

Abstract

AbstractAndrewartha and Birch (1954) envisioned that natural populations are surrounded by ecological barriers, yet statistical estimates of population structure are almost completely driven by genetic analyses void of ecological information. I develop an ecological clustering routine that delineates natural populations from the synchronisation and desynchronisation in the population dynamics of continuously distributed species. The method is applied to the North American Breeding Bird Survey (Sauer et al. 2017), where it identifies two to five populations per species for 160 species, and leaves the population differentiation unresolved for 139 species. This provides one of the first statistical methods for population dynamics delineated population structure.