Integrating projected habitat change and existing population trends to prioritise conservation, monitoring, and research for Indian birds

Understanding species vulnerability to global change requires approaches that integrate projections of future environmental change with empirical population trends; such integrated assessments remain limited in biodiverse, data-limited tropical regions. In this study, we develop and apply a scalable, decision-oriented framework that synthesises climate and land-cover projections with existing contemporary population data to assess species-level vulnerability and conservation, monitoring, and research priorities for Indian birds. Using an ensemble of machine-learning habitat-suitability models, we projected current and future habitat suitability for 955 species under two 2100 scenarios (SSP3