A Field Guide for the Entire 21st Century

These changes are described in “Survival by Degrees,” a new online project released by Audubon. It was created with one of the country’s most prominent data-visualization firms, Stamen Design.

“Survival by Degrees” is a kind of field guide for the 21st century—the entire 21st century—containing maps of not only where birds live now, but where they’ll live several decades from now. It is also a novel scientific project in its own right. After analyzing how 604 North American bird species will fare, it argues that climate change will push more than two-thirds of the continent’s birds toward extinction in the decades to come.

Read: The least popular birds in North America deserve some love

Go and type in your zip code (if you’re in the United States) or home state or province (if you’re in Canada or Mexico), and the tool will spit out a list of every major local bird species. Each bird is linked to its listing into the Audubon field guide, with descriptions of its plumage, diet, mating habits, and contemporary range—as well as a projection of its range in 2080 under a very optimistic 1.5-degree-Celsius scenario, a 2-degree scenario, and a 3-degree scenario.

Like any good field guide, Survival by Degrees will teach everyone something slightly different. New Yorkers might see that piping plovers, a favorite shorebird, will vanish from much of the Atlantic Coast. The Baltimore Oriole, meanwhile, will struggle to roost in some places near Camden Yards. And one of the country’s smallest songbirds, the golden-crowned kinglet, will be driven out of nearly its entire range in Oregon.

This kind of localization is possible because the underlying sources of data are immense. Audubon’s scientific team pulled together 140 million bird sightings across more than 70 different data sources, including the U.S. Geological Survey and Parks Canada. Some of the data came from Ebird, an online repository run by Cornell University that tracks birds sightings recorded by non-scientists. The team matched each of those observations with environmental data about the local climate: in effect, fitting a bird to its climatic range today. Then they used global climate models to project how those ranges could shift in the future. For example, “a lot of these areas in Wisconsin will look more like Kansas,” Brooke Bateman, the senior climate scientist at the Audubon Society, told me.

Read: The quiet disappearance of birds in North America

Stamen previously collaborated with Audubon on a 2014 visualization of climate data. (This article is the first time they’ve discussed their collaboration with the press.) But this version has much higher spatial resolution and is much more localized than the last iteration. “If you can take what feels like a giant, abstract, kind of immovable problem like climate change and break it down into something you can actually see, then you’re one step closer to motivating a person,” John Mahoney, the vice president of products at the Audubon Society, told me. “Localizing the data was the number one priority.”