Managing birds of conservation concern on sandy shores: How much room for future conservation actions is there?

Resource limitations often prevent the active management required to maintain habitat quality in protected areas. Because restrictions in access or allowable public activities are the sole conservation measure in these locations, an important question to consider is whether species of conservation concern truly benefit from parcels that are shielded from human disturbance. Here, we assess the conservation benefit of protecting birds from human recreation on over 204 km of sandy beaches by (a) estimating the total area of beach-nesting bird habitat that has been created by conservation protections; (b) quantifying the change in nesting habitat extent should further conservation protections be implemented; and (c) providing data to inform future protected area expansion.

Optimizing conservation benefits for threatened beach fauna following severe natural disturbances.

Wildlife on sandy beaches is often constrained by transformation of natural areas for human use, and opportunities for acquiring or restoring new habitat are rare. Storms can often force changes in land use naturally by re-shaping coastal landforms, thereby creating high quality habitat; yet, wildlife requirements are seldom considered in post-storm recovery planning, and conservation practitioners lack suitable evidence to argue for the protection of habitats freshly formed by storms. Here we used a maximum-likelihood spatial modeling approach to quantify impacts of Hurricane Sandy (mid-Atlantic United States, October 2012) on nesting habitat of four bird species of conservation concern: American oystercatchers, black skimmers, least terns and piping plovers.