Recipient Organization
STATE UNIV OF NEW YORK
(N/A)
SYRACUSE,NY 13210
Performing Department
Environmental & Forest Biology
Non Technical Summary
Despite several decades of intensive management, the New Jersey population of piping plovers has notincreased, on average. Threats to productivity, such as predation, and insufficient habitat quantity orquality may account for this lack of population growth. We propose to study factors affectingreproductive success at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge which contains approximately25% of the state's piping plover population. Nest cameras, nest and brood monitoring, radio-tracking ofchicks and adults, and band resighting will be used to estimate habitat use and survival rates, and todetermine fates of nests and chicks. Our results will provide Edwin B. Forsythe NWR with managementrecommendations for increasing productivity of piping plovers.Awarded Start Date: 3/15/16Sponsor: US Fish and Wildlife Service
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The project objectives are 1) to compare nestsurvival, chick survival, proportions of nests and chicks lost to different sources, and weekly adultsurvival among breeding sites that vary in foraging habitat quality and existing predator managementstrategies, and 2) to use automated and manual radio-tracking to document or deduce the fates ofadults that disappear during the nesting period.
Project Methods
We propose a Ph.D. project to study factors limiting piping plover reproductive success. Thestudy will take place on the Holgate Unit of the Edwin B. Forsythe NWR. Other funding will allow us toconduct parallel work at nearby sites between North Brigantine Natural Area and Stone Harbor Point,such that our entire study will include at least 25 pairs of plovers in a variety of habitat conditions. Thefield component of the study will take place between 15 April and 15 August 2016.Nest searching will be done on a daily basis in all potential nesting habitat by our team and incoordination with state, federal, and local monitors so as to avoid duplication of effort and unnecessarysite disturbance. Nests will be checked daily from a distance to determine incubation status andapproached if no incubating bird is present to determine fate and, if applicable, to surmise source of ·loss. We will have video cameras monitoring 10 nests throughout the state at any given time tocompare photographic evidence of sources of loss to circumstantial evidence recorded in the field. Wewill estimate nest survival using exposure~days based methods {Shaffer 2004).Up to SO adult piping plovers will be captured on the nest with a walk-in trap and uniquelymarked with a combination of 4 Darvic color bands. We will use band resighting data to estimateweekly apparent survival of adults. We will attach a nano-tag to the lntrascapular region of 25 adultpiping plovers. We will place 3 automated telemetry receiving towers within piping plover habitat tocontinuously record presence of radio-tagged adults. The automated receiving towers will include amulti~Yagi antenna array to capture flight bearings of birds that leave our receiving range. If an adultdisappears during the breeding season, during a nest abandonment event, or otherwise, we will usedata from the automated receiving stations to look for evidence that it flew from the site and did notreturn and will supplement that data with resighting information from state and regional monitors. Ifthe signal is still within our site but stationary, we will try to track it down to determine source of loss.All chicks hatched from nests with banded adults will be hand-captured and uniquely markedwith a combination of 4 Darvic color bands. We will attach a radio-transmitter to the intrascapularregion using glue to at least one chick (1-2 d of age) per brood (25 total). We will weigh all chicks inthese broods every 5 to 7 days to determine rates of mass gain and changes in body condition. Ifforaging habitat is limiting chick survival, either because there is little of it or the chicks cannot access it,we should see signs that chicks are undernourished. The number of surviving chicks per brood will betallied during daily foot surveys by our team in coordination with local monitors. If we suspect a radiotaggedchick has died, we will use a handheld receiver to try and track down the carcass and ascertainsource of loss. We will use Young Survival models (Lukacs et al. 2004) to estimate survival rates ofbroods with individually identifiable parents (either because they are marked or because they have astable territory location). We will also use band resighting data to estimate natal dispersal rates ofchicks banded in 2015.We will conduct behavioral observations of banded adults and chicks to assess habitat useacross a variety of different nesting and foraging habitat configurations and varying levels ofrecreational beach use. If foraging habitat is limiting chick survival because the chicks cannot access itdue to human disturbance, we will be able to link these disturbance events with chicks that areundernourished.Predator surveys will be used to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of avian andmammalian predators in piping plover nesting habitats. We will conduct bi-weekly mammalian predatortrack surveys and avian point count surveys at randomly located plots at each of our study sites. Duringeach survey, we will count the number of track trails present in each plot by predator species andidentify all avian species present within 100 m of the center of the plot. We will record plot-specificcovariates that ·may affect occupancy such as the distance to the dune, distance to the forest, anddistance to human development, survey-specific covariates that may affect occupancy such as thedistance to human recreation, the number of humans present, the distance to the nearest Americanoystercatcher nest, and the distance to the nearest least tern nest, and survey specific covariates thatmay affect detection rate, such as the saturation of the substrate, weather conditions, and trackingconditions.