Birds

To assess use of dredge material areas, avian ecologists from USGS WARC are conducting bird surveys across the annual life cycle.

WARC will assess Cape Sable seaside sparrow population response and viability under different management and habitat change scenarios. The USGS EverSparrow model will be run on future scenarios, and differences in the predicted probability of presence and the efficacy of varying conservation strategies will be evaluated.

USGS researchers are conducting ground surveys and collecting aerial imagery to understand avian use of restored habitats at Whiskey Island, Shell Island, Cheniere Ronquille, and Breton Island. They will also develop habitat maps to understand how coastal processes and episodic events influence barrier islands.

Researchers at WARC are determining if temporal mismatches between digital elevation models and land cover data can impact estimates of inundation of beach habitat for barrier islands and low-lying beaches off the Gulf Coast of Florida.

While islands are some of the most biodiverse places on earth, they are also among the most threatened. Researchers from WARC and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are assessing the vulnerability of Florida’s coastal islands to inundation from sea-level rise and estimating potential loss of the terrestrial biodiversity on Florida’s islands.

WARC researchers evaluated whether outreach campaigns targeting pet owners are effectively reaching their desired audiences, namely pet owners who might unintentionally or purposefully release their pet into the wild.

The USGS Joint Ecosystem Modeling team will use Bayesian networks to build a spatially explicit Everglades Vulnerability Analysis module based on current knowledge and existing data on fish density and biomass trends on the landscape.

USGS researchers will examine how hydrology and landscape vegetation changes impact Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow survival and population growth.

Researchers will use a multi-scale approach to determine how barrier construction and lighting may impact migratory birds in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Goals of the ATLSS Program are to help achieve a better understanding of components of the Everglades ecosystem, to provide an integrative tool for empirical studies, and to apply these tools to an adaptive management framework.

WARC researchers partnered with managers and species experts to develop a Bayesian network model and a geospatial habitat characteristics dataset to predict the number of Brown Pelican breeding pairs on islands in the northern Gulf.

WARC researchers partnered with managers and species experts to develop a Bayesian network model and a geospatial habitat characteristics dataset to predict the number of breeding pairs of Black Skimmer and Gull-billed Tern along the Northern Gulf Coast.