Documents the current distribution and changes in status for over two hundred bird species in Ohio, based on surveys across the state from 2006 to 2011.

Ten years in the making, The Kentucky Breeding Bird Atlas presents the results of a seven-year survey of all birds that nest in the Bluegrass State, providing photographs of each species. This work summarizes the distribution and abundance of these bird species, and describes such recent phenomena as the invasions of the Blue Grosbeak and House Finch and the notable decline of other familiar species. Introductory material outlines the methodology used to complete the survey and summarizes its results. Of particular interest, this work helps to document the effect human alteration of the landscape has had on our bird populations. Some of the most common and widespread species in Kentucky today, for example, may have been among the most rare only two hundred years ago. Information for each species includes its current and historical status in the state, habitat preferences, specific details of the construction and placement of nests, and other pertinent aspects of nesting biology. Results of the survey are organized by physiographic region and degree of forestation. For rare or locally distributed species, more specific details concerning individual breeding records are given. Accompanying maps plot each species' distribution and abundance within the state. An additional section briefly summarizes the former status of twelve extinct or extirpated species. The Kentucky Breeding Bird Atlas is sponsored by the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission and the Nongame Wildlife Program of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources in cooperation with the Kentucky Ornithological Society.

Maps the current distribution of all of Pennsylvania's 190 breeding birds and documents the changes in climate, habitat, and distribution since the first edition of this work. Includes habitat analyses and color photographs for each species.

Abstract: Major changes in the earth's climate and land cover over the last century are having wide-ranging effects on flora and fauna. Understanding how these changes affect on species distributions is essential to conserve and manage populations. Several studies that have examined distributional shifts among avian species have detected poleward shifts and attributed these trends to recent climate change. However, the American Midwest differs from the areas in which these studies were conducted in landscape composition, patterns of land cover change, and species assemblages, making it an ideal region to test whether poleward distributional trends transcend these ecological differences. Furthermore, to my knowledge, no multi-species avian studies to date have used spatially and temporally explicit climate and land cover data to understand which factors contributed to observed changes in distributions. I used detailed grid-based data collected during two Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas projects (1982-1987 and 2006-2011) to quantify long-term changes in latitudinal extent, center of occurrence, and number of block occurrences for 71 species. Additionally, I selected 17 representative songbird species and modeled their Ohio distributions in Atlas II using climate and/or land cover data from the same time period. This information was then back-projected with environmental data from the Atlas I time period to determine how changes in environmental determinants affected models of habitat suitability, and whether implied change in habitat suitability accurately predicted gains and losses of species from atlas blocks. My results indicated a northward shift in the northern boundaries of southerly species (6.8 +/- 4.5 km) and a southward shift in both the southern boundary and center of occurrence of northerly species (11.8 +/- 6.1 and 5.7 +/- 3.8 km, respectively). Models that included both climate and land cover were best at predicting current avian distributions. However, land cover changes, particularly in forest and agricultural lands, were the most important determinants of current distributions and were the main drivers of local colonization and extinction events at the ~25 square km scale of this study. Several climatic factors were important predictors of species' current distributions indicating that with larger temperature increases predicted for this region, these factors may become important drivers of avian distributional change. Our study suggests that climate change has already affected the distributions of bird species in Ohio, as evidenced by northward shifts in southerly species. However, over the 25-year study period, land cover changes were paramount in determining changes in avian distributions and likely driving southward shifts in northerly species. This study suggests that through strategic planning, including landscape-scale adaptive habitat management, land managers can build greater resilience to the more extreme climate pressures predicted by the end of the century.