Migratory Birds

With support from the U.S. Prairie Pothole Joint Venture (PPJV), the U.S. Forest Service, and The Nature Conservancy, Northern Prairie is synthesizing literature on the effects of management practices on grassland bird species. The need for these syntheses was identified by the PPJV, a part of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, in support of its objective to stabilize or increase...

The U.S. Forest Service defines sensitive species as species that need special management to maintain and improve their status on National Forests and Grasslands, and prevent a need for listing under the Endangered Species Act. The Sprague’s pipit and Baird’s sparrow are listed as sensitive species in the Northern Region of the U.S. Forest Service. These species require large patches of native...

Agriculture is the dominant land use on privately owned lands in the northern Great Plains of the United States. Management decisions on agricultural lands are influenced by a variety of policies and programs established by the federal government in periodic Farm Bills. In 1985, Congress passed the Food Security Act. Title XII of the Act established the Conservation Reserve Program or CRP, a...

Waterbird distribution and habitat use are influenced by human activities of agriculture and land-management practices, such as grazing or burning. For many waterbird species, our knowledge of their ecology and factors influencing their abundance and importance of different habitats is very limited. Such information can help direct more effective habitat restoration, management, and conservation...

Monitoring colonial waterbirds is essential to detect and to provide insights about changes in waterbird distribution and abundance. For colonial waterbirds, major population fluctuations often go undetected because surveys are not conducted regularly, inventory methods are inconsistent, or estimates have unknown reliability. The waterbird colony at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge in North...

Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (NPWRC) has a long history of conducting broad-scale demographic analyses on available waterfowl. Our current efforts are collaborative with a variety of partners. Current studies include: 1) analysis of banding data for lesser scaup to inform the role of harvest on the continental population; 2) analysis of North American survey information of mallards to...

Population growth in upland-nesting ducks is highly influenced by spatial and temporal variation in nest survival, and mammalian predators are the major cause of nest failure. Beginning in spring 2018, a graduate student from South Dakota State University and co-advised by a NPWRC scientist will study predator communities and their movements in landscapes with varying grassland patch composition...

Sound management of migratory bird breeding populations in the U.S. Prairie Pothole Region hinges on effective monitoring programs and comprehensive analyses of long-term survey data. To this end, Northern Prairie provides support to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in several important areas. The Four-Square-Mile Breeding Duck and Habitat Survey was developed by Northern Prairie in the mid...

The objectives of this study are to (1) investigate whether the immune system will respond to chemical stressors, such as new flame retardant compounds, and (2) determine if such chemical stressors influence white blood cells (WBC) responses after exposure to a viral pathogen mimicking bird flu.

The Challenge: The Gulf of Mexico has critically important breeding, staging, and wintering habitats for North America’s migratory birds. Unfortunately, limited information is available to quantitatively characterize species composition, distribution, and abundance of birds Gulf-wide, particularly for seabirds. The number of platforms and cumulative level of oil and gas activity in the northern...

Marl prairie is the most diverse freshwater vegetation community in the Greater Everglades and provides the only suitable habitat for the federally endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow (CSSS; Ammodramus maritimus mirabilis ).

EverSnail, developed in collaboration with the University of West Florida, is an age- and size-structured spatially-explicit landscape model of native apple snails ( Pomacea paludosa ).