Symposium Participants
Stephen Brown
Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences
81 Stage Road P.O. Box 1770
Manomet, MA 02345 USA
phone: 508.224.6521
fax: 508.224.9220
Collaborative Approaches to the Study of Shorebird Migration and Conservation in North America
The migration ecology of shorebirds presents special problems for conservation, and makes large scale collaborative programs essential. The Shorebird Conservation Plans for the U.S. and Canada led to the development of two major programs addressing shorebird migration and conservation at large spatial scales. This report describes several of these programs, and how they might serve as models for project addressing austral migrant shorebirds. Because each of these efforts involved many collaborators, the primary authors for each effort are listed at the beginning of each section.
The Program for Regional and International Shorebird Monitoring (PRISM, http://amap.wr.usgs.gov/index.html ) provides a single blueprint for addressing monitoring needs during migration, wintering, and breeding that were identified as critical for shorebird conservation. PRISM has three main components: breeding surveys in arctic, boreal, and temperate regions, migration surveys, and neotropical surveys. Site selection criteria and survey protocols are being developed that will be useful for monitoring efforts throughout the hemisphere.
The Shorebird Research Group of the Americas (SRGA), which also formed from the Shorebird Plans, determined that understanding the causes of shorebird declines would require a coordinated international, multidisciplinary effort. The group recently proposed the Hemisphere Shorebird Project, a collaborative approach to determining limiting factors for representative species through research on a hemispheric scale. This project will weigh the effects of the five most likely causes for declines across the range of several species, including habitat loss, climate change, predation, contaminants, and human disturbance. The SRGA is open to participation by anyone interested in shorebird research, and will be coordinated by an international steering committee .
Both of these programs could have potential application to work on austral migrants through the application of similar collaborative approaches, or modification of protocols developed for hemispheric migrants. We also discuss below one example of a collaborative effort to address the goals of PRISM and determine likely causes for declines of a particular species, the multi-partner work on American Oystercatchers underway along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States.