2026-10-14T17:06:53Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/31946418 2026-09-15T15:01:47Z category_24238 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Code and data for: Drought to deluge: Differential impacts of snow on mountain chickadee reproduction across the Sierra Nevada mountains Joseph Welklin (13994910) Lauren E. Whitenack (15213246) Benjamin R. Sonnenberg (9041306) Carrie L. Branch (5122913) Angela M Pitera (13995027) Sofia M. Haley (19498780) Ai Ana H Richmond (23853014) Vladimir V Pravosudov (13995039) Ecology not elsewhere classified Long-term study participatory science reproduction nonstationary snow depth snow drought snow deluge chickadee <p dir="ltr">Changing climates are reshaping animal populations, but our understanding of how demographic trends are shaped by individual responses to local environmental conditions is often limited to long-term studies with restricted spatial scales. Increasing evidence suggests that environmental extremes exert differential selection pressures across environments, often leading to nonstationary biological responses among populations inhabiting different regions. Citizen science observations can detect variation in these responses at large geographic scales, but analyses of citizen science data often lack the nuanced insights into individual-level responses that are required to explain the origins of such variation. Here we present a new research framework that uses long-term data to validate, then inform analyses of citizen science data to measure reproductive responses to environmental variation across large geographic scales. We use this approach to investigate how reproduction in a montane-adapted songbird, the mountain chickadee (<i>Poecile gambeli</i>), varies across elevations and latitudes in response to drought and deluge snowfall extremes throughout the Sierra Nevada mountain range in North America. Our results reveal that chickadee reproduction in lower and higher elevation populations is often, but not always, differentially impacted by drought and deluge conditions and these relationships vary across latitudes. Reproductive performance in the northern Sierra Nevada was negatively affected by snow deluge conditions at high elevations, whereas drought conditions reduced reproductive output at low elevations. These relationships changed in the central Sierras where drought conditions negatively impacted both elevations, but deluge conditions improved reproductive performance at both low and high elevations. Reproduction in the southern Sierra Nevada was less affected by spring snow levels, likely due to the lower snow accumulation and earlier snowmelt in this region. These results emphasize the power of long-term studies to inform and interpret citizen science data in order to better understand how animal responses to environmental extremes vary across geographic scales.</p> 2026-09-15T15:01:47Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.31946418.v2 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Code_and_data_for_Drought_to_deluge_Differential_impacts_of_snow_on_mountain_chickadee_reproduction_across_the_Sierra_Nevada_mountains/31946418 CC BY 4.0