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Recovery: Farm Bill Provides Hope for the Cerulean Warbler
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With funding from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) available from the Farm Bill’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program the Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture (a partnership of state and federal agencies and NGOs including The Nature Conservancy) is helping private land owners restore cerulean habitat.
Check out the original article at the Nature Conservancy's Cool Green Science blog:
https://blog.nature.org/science/2017/08/15/recovery-farm-bill-provides-hope-for-the-cerulean-warbler/
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News & Events
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Appalachian Mountains Joint Venture Technical Committee Meeting
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Annual meeting of the AMJV Technical Committee, comprised of federal, state, NGO, and university partners to discuss science needs, barriers, and other technical issues surrounding bird conservation in the Appalachians.
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News & Events
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Bringing Back Diversity in Eastern Forests for Landowners, Wildlife
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What do biologists look for in a healthy forest? A diversity in the ages and composition of trees and occasional breaks in canopy to allow sunlight to reach understory plants.
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News & Events
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Managing Forests for Birds Video Series
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A new video series by the Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative highlights the importance of proper forest management in improving a diversity of habitat for birds and other wildlife.
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News & Events
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Nations Celebrate Centennial of Landmark Migratory Bird Treaty
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Agreement between U.S. and Canada responsible for many successes in bird conservation; will help us meet challenges that lie ahead.
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News & Events
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Partners in Flight 2016 Landbird Conservation Plan Released
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Scientists Document Widespread Declines, Urgent Need for Conservation of Landbirds in U.S. and Canada. Report calls for unprecedented partnerships across public and private sectors to reverse trends throughout bird’s life-cycles.
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News & Events
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Bhuta, Arvind
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Expertise Search
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A phantom road experiment reveals traffic noise is an invisible source of habitat degradation
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Decades of research demonstrate that roads impact wildlife and suggest traffic noise as a primary cause of population declines near roads. We created a “phantom road” using an array of speakers to apply traffic noise to a roadless landscape, directly testing the effect of noise alone on an entire songbird community during autumn migration. Thirty-one percent of the bird community avoided the phantom road. For individuals that stayed despite the noise, overall body condition decreased by a full SD and some species showed a change in ability to gain body condition when exposed to traffic noise during migratory stopover. We conducted complementary laboratory experiments that implicate foraging-vigilance behavior as one mechanism driving this pattern. Our results suggest that noise degrades habitat that is otherwise suitable, and that the presence of a species does not indicate the absence of an impact.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Global change and the groundwater management challenge
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With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and ground- water overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh ground- water needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater man- agement modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multiagent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Bird Richness and Abundance in Response to Urban Form in a Latin American City
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There is mounting evidence that urban areas influence biodiversity. Generalizations how- ever require that multiple urban areas on multiple continents be examined. Here we evaluated the role of urban areas on avian diversity for a South American city, allowing us to examine the effects of urban features common worldwide, using the city of Valdivia, Chile as case study. We assessed the number of birds and their relative abundance in 152 grid cells of equal size (250 m2) distributed across the city. We estimated nine independent variables: land cover diversity (DC), building density (BD), impervious surface (IS),municipal green space (MG),non-municipal green space (NG), domestic garden space (DG), distance to the periphery (DP), social welfare index (SW), and vegetation diversity (RV). Impervious surface represent 41.8% of the study area, while municipal green, non-municipal green and domestic garden represent 11.6%, 23.6% and 16% of the non- man made surface. Exotic vegetation species represent 74.6% of the total species identified across the city. We found 32 bird species, all native with the exception of House Sparrow and Rock Pigeon. The most common species were House Sparrow and Chilean Swallow. Total bird richness responds negatively to IS and MG, while native bird richness responds positively to NG and negatively to BD, IS DG and, RV. Total abundance increase in areas with higher values of DC and BD, and decrease in areas of higher values of IS, SW and VR. Native bird abundance responds positively to NG and negatively to BD, IS MG, DG and RV. Our results suggest that not all the general patterns described in previous studies, conducted mainly in the USA, Europe, and Australia, can be applied to Latin American cities, having important implications for urban planning. Conservation efforts should focus on non-municipal areas, which harbor higher bird diversity, while municipal green areas need to be improved to include elements that can enhance habitat quality for birds and other species. These findings are relevant for urban planning in where both types of green space need to be considered, especially non-municipal green areas, which includes wetlands, today critically threatened by urban development.
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Climate Science Documents
