Excerpt from submission to Michigan Sea Grant: Climate change and human land use will require that species adapt or redistribute, reorganizing and potentially damaging global biodiversity. The severity of past and future projections of climate change is particularly extreme in the Great Lakes Region with significant warming trends, increased summertime precipitation, and changing lake levels. This series of environmental changes across the watershed will result in severe consequences to ecological communities within the Great Lakes, including the distributions and adaptations of marsh birds and waterfowl that use the large network of lakes, coastal marshes, wetlands, and rivers. This project will use the Audubon Survival by Degrees Dataset, a prediction of North American bird range shifts for hundreds of species under the influence of climate and human impacts. Different species requiring unique environmental conditions and having variable dispersal abilities will create new ecological communities in the Great Lakes. Using the predicted changes to the distribution of Great Lakes birds—especially marsh birds and waterfowl in coastal wetlands—I will establish the changes to bird co-occurrence and community reassembly, and then infer changes to interspecific interactions, competition, and assess other potential consequences to Great Lakes ecological communities. Understanding the projected shifts to bird distributions and their implications for competition and the rest of the ecosystem could provide valuable insight into critical or sensitive areas to prioritize for the conservation of species and biodiversity.