Spatio-temporal Trend Analysis of Spring Arrival Data for Migratory Birds

There is increasing interest in spatio-temporal analysis of environmental and ecological response to changes in the climate due to the recent concerns about climate change. In this work we propose a spatio-temporal modeling framework for analyzing environmental and ecological data while accounting for spatial and temporal structure, as well as climate effects. As an example, we consider data on bird migration in the United States and analyze the spring arrival dates of Purple Martins between historic data (1905-1940) from the North American Bird Phenology