title: Optimal management of a multispecies shorebird flyway under sea-level rise.
abstract: Every year, millions of migratory shorebirds fly through the East Asian-Australasian Flyway between their arctic breeding grounds and Australasia. This flyway includes numerous coastal wetlands in Asia and the Pacific that are used as stopover sites where birds rest and feed. Loss of a few important stopover sites through sea-level rise (SLR) could cause sudden population declines. We formulated and solved mathematically the problem of how to identify the most important stopover sites to minimize losses of bird populations across flyways by conserving land that facilitates upshore shifts of tidal flats in response to SLR. To guide conservation investment that minimizes losses of migratory bird populations during migration, we developed a spatially explicit flyway model coupled with a maximum flow algorithm. Migratory routes of 10 shorebird taxa were modeled in a graph theoretic framework by representing clusters of important wetlands as nodes and the number of birds flying between 2 nodes as edges. We also evaluated several resource allocation algorithms that required only partial information on flyway connectivity (node strategy, based on the impacts of SLR at nodes; habitat strategy, based on habitat change at sites; population strategy, based on population change at sites; and random investment). The resource allocation algorithms based on flyway information performed on average 15% better than simpler allocations based on patterns of habitat loss or local bird counts. The Yellow Sea region stood out as the most important priority for effective conservation of migratory shorebirds, but investment in this area alone will not ensure the persistence of species across the flyway. The spatial distribution of conservation investments differed enormously according to the severity of SLR and whether information about flyway connectivity was used to guide the prioritizations. With the rapid ongoing loss of coastal wetlands globally, our method provides insight into efficient conservation planning for migratory species.
authors: Department of Biology and Department of Environmental Earth System Science, 473 Via Ortega, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, U.S.A.; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Queensland, 4072, Australia. takuya@stanford.edu.
authors: Takuya
authors: T
authors: Iwamura
authors: Richard A
authors: RA
authors: Fuller
authors: Hugh P
authors: HP
authors: Possingham
mesh_terms: D025041:Animal Migration; D000818:Animals; D001110:Arctic Regions; D001208:Asia; D044362:Australasia; D001717:Birds / Q000502:physiology*; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D053833:Wetlands
keywords: Algoritmo de flujo máximo; East Asian-Australasian Flyway; aves costeras migratorias; coastal wetlands; conservation prioritization; ecological networks; global migrants; graph theory; humedales costeros; maximum flow algorithm; migrantes globales; migratory shorebirds; priorización de la conservación; redes ecológicas; ruta migratoria Asia-Australasia de Oriente; teoría de gráficos