A project proposal by a SUNY-ESF professor and graduate student was recently awarded a grant through a new program to restore habitats for coastal birds.

The Gulf Coast Conservation Grants Program (GCCGP) was announced last week by Southern Company in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF). Southern Company and NFWF have been working together since 2003 and have awarded more than 80 grants, totaling more than $21.1 million, to restore bird habitats.

The GCCGP will award 29 grant recipients across the U.S. for proposals that focus specifically on protecting coastal bird populations that span Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle.

The project proposal – which was one of the 29 selected for the grant – aims to provide information that will help managers and decision-makers effectively protect snowy plovers, a shorebird that lives along the Gulf Coast, from the effects of vehicle collisions.

Jonathan Cohen, an assistant professor at SUNY-ESF, said in an email that his involvement with the research began with studying the snowy plover, which nests at sites on the Florida panhandle.

“The snowy plover faces many similar challenges to the species I had been working with earlier in my career, so I felt that I could contribute useful research,” Cohen said.

Maureen Durkin, a graduate student of Cohen’s who had previous experience working in parts of the Gulf Coast on shorebird conservation, is collaborating with Cohen on the project.

“Compared to other regions of the U.S., coastal bird communities have previously been understudied on the Gulf,” Durkin said in an email. “Recently, especially in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, more attention and resources have been devoted to the region’s wildlife.”

For this project, Durkin and Cohen are attempting to reduce vehicle speeds by evaluating park-created “shorebird nesting zones,” where the speed on the road drops from 35 mph to 20 mph and signage warns visitors of flightless shorebird and seabird chicks, Durkin said.

Durkin added that they were able to monitor vehicle speed within the seashore by using new traffic counters. The traffic counters collect data on traffic patters and speed.

“Simultaneously, my crew conducted daily surveys for wildlife roadkill, documenting species, age and location of animals killed,” Durkin added.

This information allows the team to determine whether different speed reduction measures actually have an impact on speed, and whether the mortality rates of shorebirds and other wildlife killed on the road change with traffic speed and/or with different speed reduction measures.

“In addition to our traffic data and surveys, ESF and Gulf Islands staff also intensively monitor the hatching success and chick survival of snowy plovers nesting on the island,” Durkin said. “This information will allow us to predict the population-level impacts of vehicle mortalities on the species.”

This particular grant is for one year, but the snowy plovers and other wildlife on the Gulf Coast face multiple challenges related to human activities, Cohen said.

These threats include human development of habitat, disturbance of wildlife by recreational activity, mortality due to vehicle use, increased populations of predators that are associated with humans, the risk of future oil spills and habitat loss to sea level rise.

Cohen said the problem may not be one that is fixable, but “the challenge is to ensure that wildlife populations can persist in the midst of human use of coastal areas.”

While Florida may seem far from Syracuse, SUNY-ESF’s wildlife program conducts research in a wide array of locations and a diverse group of species, because all the work stems from the central goal of aiding management and conservation through research, Durkin said.

Published on September 7, 2015 at 11:22 pm

Contact Anjali: acalwis@syr.edu