Modeling First Arrival of Migratory Birds Using a Hierarchical Max-Infinitely Divisible Process

Abstract

Humans have recorded the arrival dates of migratory birds for millennia, searching for trends and patterns. As the first arrival among individuals in a species is the realized tail of the probability distribution of arrivals, the appropriate statistical framework with which to analyze such events is extreme value theory. Here, for the first time, we apply formal extreme value techniques to the dynamics of bird migrations. We study the annual first arrivals of Magnolia Warblers using modern tools from the statistical field of extreme value analysis. Using observations from the eBird database, we model the spatial distribution of observed Magnolia Warbler arrivals as a max-infinitely divisible process, which allows us to spatially interpolate observed annual arrivals in a probabilistically coherent way and to project arrival dynamics into the future by conditioning on climatic variables. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear online.