Anew study led by BGC PhD student Diego Ellis Soto and BGC Director Walter Jetz in Ecography a continental scale view of hummingbird diversity. By borrowing strength across different types of biodiversity datasets, this study reflects a core research area of the BGC, namely spatial modeling frameworks widely applicable to a large number of species. Species point occurrences, expert range maps and species specific limitations where combined to build species distribution models at 1km detail. The robustness of this modeling approach was validated with extensive hummingbird inventories across South America collected by local ornithologists and is publicly available for download along this publication.

When aggregating the distribution of 276 hummingbird species, a hotspot of hummingbird richness was identified in the south west of Colombia.

These maps prevent a detailed picture of this iconic bird group for conservation and decision making and are currently being implemented and scaled up at BGC and Map of Life to predict the distributions of thousands of species.

The study is available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecog.05119

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