February 2025

The American pika (Ochotona princeps), an iconic small lagomorph, typically inhabits mountainous regions across much of western North America, and is highly sensitive to shifting environmental conditions. Our work highlights how ordinal species distribution models can be used with temporally-ordered site status (e.g. “occupied” versus “previously occupied” versus “no evidence of current or past occupation”) to explore responses to climate change. At sites along the southern edge of the species’ range in the Rocky Mountains, ordinal models emphasize winter temperature as the most important factor driving present-day and past range dynamics of pikas, whereas binary models of occurrence identify summer temperature as the strongest variable. 

 

Cover photo by Lincoln Pettinger, U.S. Geological Survey. Full open access article here.

Download high resolution file: ecog_2025_02_cover_01.pdf