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AUTHORS: Craig A. Davis, Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, Oklahoma State University
ABSTRACT: Millions of shorebirds annually migrate through interior North America between their Arctic breeding grounds and temperate and tropic wintering grounds in Central and South America. During migration, shorebirds rely on stopover sites, which are mostly wetlands, to refuel depleted energy and nutrient reserves that are critical for continuing migration, survival, and reproduction. Playas and other wetlands throughout the Southern Great Plains provide critical stopover habitat for migrating shorebirds. Given that these wetlands are spatially and temporally dynamic, developing conservation strategies for shorebirds can be challenging. In fact, because the habitat-use patterns of migrating shorebirds depend not only on the characteristics of the individual stopover wetland (e.g., availability of food resources and appropriate habitat conditions), but also on the composition of the landscape surrounding the wetland, development and implementation of large-scale conservation efforts for shorebirds must incorporate a multiscale approach. In this presentation, I will highlight our past research efforts that have examined shorebird habitat-use patterns at multiple scales from two study areas (playas in western Texas and ephemeral wetlands in central Oklahoma) in the Southern Great Plains and discuss the implications of these results as they pertain to present and future shorebird conservation efforts for the Southern Great Plains.
