“ is the amplitude-how loud the noise is,” said Rosa, who is now an assistant professor of biology, ecology and conservation at St. But they were less abundant at sites producing drilling noise, suggesting they likely avoided those sites altogether. Neither type of noise, on the other hand, affected nesting success of chestnut-collared longspur. Savannah sparrows and Sprague’s pipits that nested around the experimental setups that played short bursts of noise had lower nesting success than birds that nested near setups that made constant, lower volume noise. In a study published recently in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the researchers described that constant, quieter noise of pumping was less of a problem for these bird species than occasional loud bursts of noise caused by drilling. They also marked bird nests and returned to them for monitoring every few days over the research periods. The researchers then counted all of the birds they saw and heard 400 meters north and south of these structures, listening for sounds like the chestnut-collared longspur song heard in the clip above. In other areas, they set up similar sound systems and solar panels but didn’t play any sounds in order to tease apart the effects of noise versus the structures themselves. In some areas of the prairie, they set up a sound system powered by solar panels to mimic the sounds of oil drilling and pumpjacks. Drilling įrom 2013 to 2015, they set out to southeastern Alberta from May to August, during these birds’ breeding season. Patricia Rosa, a PhD student at the University of Manitoba at the time, and her colleague Nicola Koper, a professor at that university, conducted an experiment to see what might be affecting chestnut-collared longspurs ( Calcarius ornatus), Sprague’s pipits ( Anthus spragueii), Savannah sparrows ( Passerculus sandwichensis) and vesper sparrows ( Pooecetes gramineus) in the prairies. Was it the noise from the initial drilling or the ongoing noise of pumping? If the problem was noise, they wondered what kind might affect the birds more. Researchers knew fewer birds were showing up in areas with oil infrastructure, but they weren’t sure whether the noise or the presence of roads and the structures themselves were to blame. Oil pumpjacks are found all over southeastern Alberta prairie lands, which is also home to many Canadian songbird species. This initiative could then act as a strategic template to guide further efforts involving stable isotopes, light-sensitive geolocators, and other technologies.Occasional, loud bursts of noise are disrupting threatened songbird species in the Canadian prairies. We propose a large-scale coordinated sampling effort on the wintering grounds to establish an isotopic atlas of migratory connectivity for North American Neotropical migrants and suggest that isotopic variance be considered as a valuable metric to quantify migratory connectivity. The isotope approach could act as a rapid means of establishing basic patterns of migratory connectivity across numerous species and populations. However, additional tools to constrain longitude such as DNA markers or other isotopes would be desirable for establishing breeding or molt origins of species with broad longitudinal distributions. Incorporating relative abundance information from the North American Breeding Bird Survey in our Bayesian assignment models generally resulted in a reduction in potential assignment areas on breeding grounds. Here we demonstrate how opportunistic sampling of feathers of 30 species of wintering birds in Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, regions that have typically been poorly sampled for estimating migratory connectivity, can be assigned to breeding areas in North America through both advanced spatial assignment to probability surfaces and through simpler map lookup approaches. Stable isotope methods, especially those using stable hydrogen isotope abundance in feathers ('Hf) combined with Bayesian assignment techniques incorporating prior information such as relative abundance of breeding birds, now provide a fast and reliable means of establishing migratory connectivity, especially for Neotropical migrants that breed in North America and molt prior to fall migration. Such information allows more effective application of conservation efforts by applying focused actions along movement trajectories at the population level. There is an overdue and urgent need to establish patterns of migratory connectivity linking breeding grounds, stopover sites, and wintering grounds of migratory birds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |