Case Study: National Audubon Society achieves large-scale climate-impact modeling to protect 604 bird species with Domino Data Lab

Analyzing the Effects of Climate Change on Bird Populations

The National Audubon Society, a century-old non-profit dedicated to protecting birds, faced a new existential threat: climate change. As community-science observations and climate data exploded, Audubon needed to scale its quantitative analyses to produce individualized, high-resolution range forecasts for hundreds of species — a task that required massive compute, reproducibility, and faster model iteration.

Working with Domino Data Lab, Audubon scaled from 40 to 604 species and built over 180,000 models (160 models per species across seasons and three warming scenarios), cutting years of work to months. Domino’s language-agnostic, reproducible platform and Kubernetes compute enabled rapid model selection, deployment, and collaboration, producing the most in-depth assessment of climate risk to North American birds, pinpointing vulnerable species and habitats, guiding targeted conservation and policy, and showing that limiting warming to 1.5°C could greatly improve outcomes for many at-risk species.

National Audubon Society

Chad Wilsey

Director of Conservation Science