Effective New Model for Predicting Shorebird Habitat | The Wildlife Society

[Chris Merkord]

Piping plovers, a species of small shorebird that have been threatened on the east coast since the 1980s, are a pioneer species, often among the first birds to seek out successional habitat after coastal storms. A new model developed by researchers at Virginia Tech and the USGS offers a way to look at plover habitat 50-100 years in the future. Image credit: Katherina Gieder

Posted on August 14, 2015

 

Seashore managers have a new tool to help them protect future habitat for the federally endangered piping plover.

 

“A lot of the national parks and especially the national seashores along the East Coast are currently revising their general management plans,” said Katherina Gieder, a graduate student at Virginia Tech and lead author of a new study published recently in Ecological Modelling. “It’s a hugely important tool that managers can use.”

 

Read more: http://wildlife.org/effective-new-model-for-predicting-shorebird-habitat/

 

 

The publication described in this article is:

 

Gieder, Katherina D., Sarah M. Karpanty, James D. Fraser, Daniel H. Catlin, Benjamin T. Gutierrez, Nathaniel G. Plant, Aaron M. Turecek, E. Robert Thieler. 2014. A Bayesian network approach to predicting nest presence of the federally-threatened piping plover (Charadrius melodus) using barrier island features. Ecological Modelling 276: 38-50. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.01.005