Enhancing monitoring and transboundary collaboration for conserving migratory species under global change: The priority case of the red kite.

Calls for urgent action to conserve biodiversity under global change are increasing, and conservation of migratory species in this context poses special challenges. In the last two decades the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) has provided a framework for several subsidiary instruments including action plans for migratory bird species, but the effectiveness and transferability of these plans remain unclear. Such laws and policies have been credited with positive outcomes for the conservation of migratory species, but the lack of international coordination and on-ground implementation pose major challenges.

Quantifying the Contribution of Habitats and Pathways to a Spatially Structured Population Facing Environmental Change.

The consequences of environmental disturbance and management are difficult to quantify for spatially structured populations because changes in one location carry through to other areas as a result of species movement. We develop a metric, , for measuring the contribution of a habitat or pathway to network-wide population growth rate in the face of environmental change. This metric is different from other contribution metrics, as it quantifies effects of modifying vital rates for habitats and pathways in perturbation experiments.

Ecosystem service flows from a migratory species: Spatial subsidies of the northern pintail.

Migratory species provide important benefits to society, but their cross-border conservation poses serious challenges. By quantifying the economic value of ecosystem services (ESs) provided across a species' range and ecological data on a species' habitat dependence, we estimate spatial subsidies-how different regions support ESs provided by a species across its range. We illustrate this method for migratory northern pintail ducks in North America.

A general modeling framework for describing spatially structured population dynamics.

Variation in movement across time and space fundamentally shapes the abundance and distribution of populations. Although a variety of approaches model structured population dynamics, they are limited to specific types of spatially structured populations and lack a unifying framework. Here, we propose a unified network-based framework sufficiently novel in its flexibility to capture a wide variety of spatiotemporal processes including metapopulations and a range of migratory patterns.

Recreation economics to inform migratory species conservation: Case study of the northern pintail.

Quantification of the economic value provided by migratory species can aid in targeting management efforts and funding to locations yielding the greatest benefits to society and species conservation. Here we illustrate a key step in this process by estimating hunting and birding values of the northern pintail (Anas acuta) within primary breeding and wintering habitats used during the species' annual migratory cycle in North America. We used published information on user expenditures and net economic values (consumer surplus) for recreational viewing and hunting to determine the economic value of pintail-based recreation in three primary breeding areas and two primary wintering areas.

Prospects for stakeholder coordination by protected-area managers in Europe.

Growing resource demands by humans, invasive species, natural hazards, and a changing climate have created broad-scale impacts and the need for broader-extent conservation activities that span ownerships and even political borders. Implementing regional-scale conservation brings great challenges, and learning how to overcome these challenges is essential for maintaining biodiversity (i.e.

Quantitative tools for implementing the new definition of significant portion of the range in the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

In 2014, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and National Marine Fisheries Service announced a new policy interpretation for the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Coffee agroforests remain beneficial for neotropical bird community conservation across seasons.

Coffee agroforestry systems and secondary forests have been shown to support similar bird communities but comparing these habitat types are challenged by potential biases due to differences in detectability between habitats. Furthermore, seasonal dynamics may influence bird communities differently in different habitat types and therefore seasonal effects should be considered in comparisons. To address these issues, we incorporated seasonal effects and factors potentially affecting bird detectability into models to compare avian community composition and dynamics between coffee agroforests and secondary forest fragments.

Explaining local-scale species distributions: relative contributions of spatial autocorrelation and landscape heterogeneity for an avian assemblage.

Understanding interactions between mobile species distributions and landcover characteristics remains an outstanding challenge in ecology. Multiple factors could explain species distributions including endogenous evolutionary traits leading to conspecific clustering and endogenous habitat features that support life history requirements. Birds are a useful taxon for examining hypotheses about the relative importance of these factors among species in a community.