New Migration Maps Assist Birders and Scientists Discover Their Sister Cities

From the Winter 2024 concern of Dwelling Hen journal. Subscribe now.

Kristen Heath-Acre lives in Columbia, Missouri, which formally has a sister-city relationship with Hakusan Metropolis, Japan.

However Heath-Acre, the state ornithologist for the Missouri Division of Conservation, says she feels extra of a sister-city connection to the city of Santa Marta and the mountain forests close to the coast of northern Colombia. As a result of by a brand new set of maps produced utilizing eBird knowledge—referred to as eBird Shared Stewardship Maps—Heath-Acre can see that Missouri has a particular reference to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, because the winter residence of Cerulean Warblers and different migratory songbirds that breed within the Present-Me State.

Based on Heath-Acre, recognizing these particular migratory-bird connections between locations within the north and south is a key to efficient conservation for these species that fly up and down the hemisphere.

“Birds on the entire are disappearing. Their populations are declining,” she says. “And so if we are attempting to assist birds on the entire right here within the U.S., we now have to have a look at their complete life cycle, what’s occurring all year long.”

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology produced these data-driven maps in collaboration with Companions in Flight, a consortium of bird-conservation scientists within the Western Hemisphere. More and more, scientists are emphasizing the significance of full life-cycle conservation—preserving and defending the habitat {that a} migratory fowl wants for each its breeding and nonbreeding durations.

Visualizing The place “Our” Birds Go When They Go away

“We regularly consider birds as belonging to our states, or belonging to the place they’re once they’re breeding,” says Sarah Kendrick, a migratory fowl biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “However actually, we’re solely internet hosting these birds for just a few months of the yr. They’re just about tropical birds.”

For instance, eBird knowledge present {that a} Cerulean Warbler in Missouri’s Ozarks has a breeding window of about 49 days earlier than making ready for migration. However nearly half of that fowl’s yr—an estimated 149 days—is spent in Colombia throughout the nonbreeding interval.

“We share these migratory fowl populations with our conservation companions throughout the hemisphere,” says Kendrick. “And we all know that they’re dealing with main threats all through that full yr. These eBird stewardship maps assist to color that image in a extremely cool visible approach, of the place our shared birds are touring past our borders.”

The maps are powered by a dataset that consists of 44 million eBird checklists submitted by birders from 14 million places all through the Western Hemisphere from 2007 to 2021.

“It’s a number of knowledge, and mainly we will see every species commentary in every guidelines as a knowledge level,” says Archie Jiang, the Cornell Lab laptop programmer who generated the Shared Stewardship Maps. Jiang graduated from Cornell College in Could 2023 as a pc science main, and he was an officer within the Cornell Birding Membership as an undergrad. “We’ve this area and time knowledge of the place persons are observing birds, and that is the uncooked knowledge that we’re working with.”

Jiang fed modeled eBird knowledge into a classy program (developed by Cornell Lab knowledge scientist Matt Strimas- Mackey) that recognized locations the place migratory birds are concentrated within the nonbreeding season. He then weighted these outcomes by the proportion of fowl breeding populations that happen inside a focused state or area, basically highlighting components of the map the place these birds go on migration. For instance, he discovered that Black-throated Blue Warblers that breed in New York State present a really sturdy migratory connection to overwintering grounds in Jamaica.

Shared Stewardship Maps

“Birds are one of many issues that may hyperlink us throughout massive spatial scales,” says Cornell Lab quantitative utilized ecologist Andrew Stillman. “These connections have existed for 1000’s and 1000’s of years, however they’re actually laborious to grasp. They’re invisible.”

Stillman says that in latest a long time, the appearance of radio- and GPS-tag monitoring applied sciences allowed scientists to get a glimpse of those migratory connections between locations; put a tag on a fowl, observe it because it flies south, and see the place it spends the winter.

However whereas monitoring tags are good for learning particular person birds, they’ll’t yield knowledge that’s helpful on the scale of whole populations.

“The best data [for conservation scientists] could be if we put a tag on each single, stinking fowl in the complete U.S., however we will’t try this,” Stillman says. “These eBird Shared Stewardship Maps present us with baseline data on the species degree.”

Deb Hahn, the worldwide relations director on the Affiliation of Fish and Wildlife Companies, is placing these eBird maps to good use. Hahn directs the Southern Wings initiative, a partnership of state companies that connects states with conservation teams in Latin America. Hahn says the eBird Shared Stewardship Maps are extraordinarily precious in her efforts to indicate the organic connection between areas within the U.S. and areas south of the border, as she facilitates full life-cycle conservation initiatives for migratory birds.

“The stewardship maps will help a state company get a way of … what areas may be an important place for them to put money into to have extra affect on the best variety of species,” Hahn says.

By way of Southern Wings, 41 state companies have donated almost $3.9 million to initiatives in 11 international locations in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Hahn thinks the eBird maps will stimulate extra such cross-border conservation.

“Having the maps helps us make a stronger case for the necessity to put conservation {dollars} in particular areas,” she says.

Importantly, say Cornell Lab scientists, these maps ought to set the stage for true collaboration between conservation biologists within the U.S. and Latin America.

Setting the Stage for Collaboration

“Ideally, we’re these maps collectively. That’s actually the entire concept behind shared stewardship,” says Viviana Ruiz Gutierrez, a local of Costa Rica who’s the director of conservation science on the Cornell Lab. “It’s to not attempt to impose a perspective or precedence, however it’s extra to know the place to search for companions and contribute to conservation efforts which are already on the bottom in Latin America.”

For instance, when the Missouri Division of Conservation wished to boost the effectiveness of their conservation funding to show round declining populations of long-distance migratory birds similar to Wooden Thrush (a state-designated Species of Best Conservation Want), they seemed to Latin America—through Southern Wings—to companion up with the Colombian conservation group SELVA.

“SELVA’s latest analysis on migratory birds has seen big profit from cross-border collaboration with U.S. and Canadian authorities companies,” says Camila Gómez, a director at SELVA. “These funds go a extremely good distance in Latin America. They’ve served to make use of and construct capability of native researchers, implement analysis and conservation actions on the bottom, and spotlight the significance of broad worldwide collaborations to ensure migratory fowl welfare all through their annual cycle.”

Heath-Acre says she’s proud that Missouri was a frontrunner within the paradigm shift towards full life-cycle conservation.

“These birds don’t notice these borders exist,” she says. “I believe Missouri has performed a extremely good job of following the birds the place they go, offering funding and assist for analysis the place these birds are going.”

Based on Sarah Kendrick of the USFWS, the eBird Shared Stewardship Maps may very well be a catalyst for ramping up full life-cycle conservation efforts. And that’s desperately wanted, as U.S. federal and state companies work to show round a large 26% loss amongst all Neotropical migratory fowl populations since 1970, in response to analysis printed in Science in 2019.

Says Kendrick, “If we’re not addressing the threats that these birds face once they’re past our borders, we’re not doing all we will.”