Shorebird Conservation

Developing a collaborative approach to conservation where partners are working together with diverse stakeholders throughout the Midcontinent Americas to conserve shorebirds and their habitats.

Shorebird Conservation

Developing a collaborative approach to conservation where partners are working together with diverse stakeholders throughout the Midcontinent Americas to conserve shorebirds and their habitats.

Buff-breasted Sandpiper · Shiloh Schulte

Shiloh Schulte working in the Arctic tagging shorebirds with GPS transmitters to understand post-breeding movements and migration pathways.

Our Approach

Midcontinent regions in the Americas are critical to numerous breeding, wintering and migrating populations of shorebirds, yet this geographic area lacked, until recently, a comprehensive strategic approach for shorebird conservation. The Midcontinent Shorebird Conservation Initiative (MSCI) fills that gap and provides a framework to guide management and conservation actions for shorebirds at the scale of the Midcontinent Flyway. It also complements existing strategic frameworks developed for the Atlantic and the Pacific Flyways.

The Midcontinent Flyway

The interior portions of Canada, the USA and Mexico as well as the western Gulf of Mexico provide important stopover, wintering and breeding areas for >16.5 million shorebirds during spring migration. Sixty four percent of shorebirds using the Midcontinent Flyway of North America will migrate to interior portions of South America to spend the boreal winter. Interior habitats in South America support numerous endemic species that are of high conservation concern. North and South American shorebirds share the tundra, wetlands and grasslands with charismatic species throughout the hemisphere like polar bears, caribou, flamingos, pumas and guanacos.

Conservation

The combination of threatened habitats, climate change, vulnerable life history, and wide-ranging migrations present significant conservation challenges for shorebirds.

Two-banded Plover

In the Americas, many Arctic- and boreal-breeding species migrate to spend their nonbreeding season in southern South America, where they share environments with endemic and austral-migrant shorebird species. Other species inhabits South America year-round. The habitats favored by shorebirds across their annual cycles — grasslands, wetlands, and beaches — have been altered dramatically over the last century. Shorebirds possess a unique set of life-history traits (e.g., small clutch size) that make them especially vulnerable to environmental and anthropogenic perturbations. The combination of threatened habitats, climate change, vulnerable life history, and wide-ranging migrations present significant conservation challenges for shorebirds

Developing and Implementing the Framework

Guided by the Conservation Standards, the strategic framework places local action in a flyway context and facilitates collaboration at the scales necessary to conserve migratory shorebirds and their habitats. Framework development enhances partner and stakeholder abilities to collaborate and integrate their current efforts throughout the Midcontinent Americas Flyway to sustain a suite of shorebird populations, and the habitats they depend upon, for present and future generations. Engaging novel partners is critical to achieve effective implementation.

Asociación Calidris and Manomet implementing a workshop with local communities for conservation planning at the WHSRN site Sabanas de Paz de Ariporo y Trinidad in Colombia. photo: Asociación Calidris

In the entire MSCI geography approximately 277 people, from 242 institutions representing 18 countries and territories participated in workshops or were directly involved in the process. Results from regional workshops are being combined into a flyway scale framework. The publication of the MCSI Framework is planned for second half of 2022.

Partners and stakeholders will be able to use the framework to identify and implement the conservation, management, legislation and other local actions that meet their objectives while also contributing at the Midcontinent flyway scale. The framework will also assist partners in obtaining and leveraging funding to implement projects.

Threats

Strategies

1. Motivate governments to increase conservation capacity

2. Strengthen and catalyze alliances for conservation

3. Increase incentives for habitat protection, enhancement and restoration

4. Manage existing and acquire new habitats

5. Develop, expand and share beneficial management practices

6. Improve knowledge of environmental stressors’ effects and address information gaps

7. Integrate climate resiliency in conservation planning and implementation

8. Build capacity for conservation by raising awareness and boosting education and training

9. Sustain MSCI leadership and actions at Flyway-scale

Laguna de Rocha, Uruguay · Pablo Rocca

Geographic Scope

The Midcontinent Shorebird Conservation Initiative (MSCI) Strategic Framework focuses on the interior (i.e. central) areas of North and South America and coastal regions of the western Gulf of Mexico, defined as the Midcontinent Americas Flyway. The Midcontinent Americas Flyway spans 135 degrees of latitude from Arctic Canada to the steppes of Patagonia and encompasses portions of the Americas that were not addressed in the Atlantic Flyway Shorebird Initiative business plan or in the Pacific Shorebird Conservation Initiative (PSCI) strategy. In Central America, the Atlantic Ocean coast (Belize to Panama) is included in the AFSI and the Pacific coast (Mexico to Panama) within the PSCI. Within the MSCI Framework’s scope, 16 countries are represented (listed south to north): Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, France (French Guiana), Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Given the size of the Midcontinent Americas Flyway, North and South America were each divided into multiple planning units. Bird Conservation Regions were used to delineate the Arctic and Boreal planning unit in Canada and Alaska, excluding coastal areas that were already included in the Pacific Americas Flyway. Temperate North America was divided into three major planning units: the Great Plains, the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Plain. In the United States, the western boundary of the Midcontinent Americas Flyway corresponds with the western edge of the administrative boundary of the Central Flyway Council, and its eastern boundary is generally the eastern boundary of the Mississippi Flyway Council. Within this area, the MSCI geographic scope was adjusted slightly by Bird Conservation Region boundaries, and upland forested ecosystems that provide little migrant shorebird habitat were removed. 

South America was divided into four major planning units based on ecological classification, and their similarities in species, threats and landscapes: Northern Andes, Grasslands and Associated Wetlands, the Amazon, and Central-Southern Andes/Patagonian Steppe.

South America planning Units

North America planning Units

Our Conservation Goal

From avocets, curlews, plovers and seedsnipes, to phalaropes, godwits, sandpipers and more, the Midcontinent Flyway is home to many extraordinary species.

The conservation of these focal species will support the conservation of all the other species within the Midcontinent Flyway.

Tawny-throated Dotterel · Monica Iglecia

Meet the Birds

Avocets and curlews, plovers and seedsnipes, phalaropes and godwits are only some of the extraordinary species that inhabit the Midcontinent Flyway.

The Midcontinent Focal species are 26 species that were selected because they use and share a variety of habitats representative of the Flyway. Some of these species were also selected because of conservation concern, like restricted distribution or declining populations, which mean they are possibly the most vulnerable species in the Flyway. 

The conservation of these focal species will support the conservation of all the other species within the Midcontinent Flyway. 

American Golden-Plover (Pluvialis dominica)

photo: Shiloh Schulte

Baird’s Sandpiper
(Calidris bairdii)

photo: Christian Artuso

Buff-breasted Sandpiper
(Calidris subruficollis)

photo: Christian Artuso

Hudsonian Godwit
(Limosa haemastica)

photo: Christian Artuso

Lesser Yellowlegs
(Tringa flavipes)

photo: Brad Winn

Pectoral Sandpiper
(Calidris melanotos)

photo: Christian Artuso

Upland Sandpiper
(Bartramia longicauda)

photo: Christian Artuso

Wilson’s Phalarope
(Phalaropus tricolor)

photo: Monica Iglecia

Long-billed Curlew
(Numenius americanus)

photo: Tom Blandford

Marbled Godwit
(Limosa fedoa fedoa)

photo: Joel Jorgensen

Mountain Plover
(Charadrius montanus)

photo: Christian Artuso

Piping Plover
(Charadrius melodus circumcinctus)

photo: Christian Artuso

Red Knot (Calidris canutus rufa and C. c. roselaari)

photo: Christian Artuso

Snowy Plover
(Charadrius nivosus nivosus)

photo: Joel Jorgensen

Western Sandpiper
(Calidris mauri)

photo: Brad Imhoff

Wilson’s Plover
(Charadrius wilsonia wilsonia)

photo: Monica Iglecia

Andean Avocet
(Recurvirostra andina)

photo: Lars Petersson

Diademed Sandpiper-Plover
(Phegornis mitchellii)

photo: Lars Petersson

Gray-breasted Seedsnipe
(Thinocorus orbignyianus)

photo: Adrian Braidotti

Magellanic Plover
(Pluvianellus socialis)

photo: Brad Winn

Rufous-bellied Seedsnipe
(Attagis gayi)

photo: Morten Ross

Tawny-throated Dotterel
(Oreopholus ruficollis)

photo: Brad Winn

Two-banded Plover
(Charadrius falklandicus)

photo: Sebastián Lescano

Endemic South American Snipes
(9 Gallinago sp.)

photo: Jhonathan Miranda

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Acknowledgements

Funding to develop the framework came from federal agencies in the U.S. and Canada as well as ConocoPhillips. Of equal value is the in-kind work from workshop participants, technical steering committees and others. This work would not have been possible without the operational and technical assistance of: Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program, Foundations of Success and Sonoran Joint Venture.