Along the U.S. Atlantic coast, at risk from climate change are more than 100 nests of the Federally threatened Piping Plover at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge [28](NWR) in Virginia; valuable acres of habitat for Red Knots at Monomoy NWR [29]in Massachusetts; and prime nesting habitat for American Oystercatchers at Edwin B. Forsythe NWR [30]in New Jersey. All three sites are members of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN). While managers know that these sites and species are vulnerable, until recently they haven’t had any systematic way of assessing or prioritizing habitats and strategies for climate-change adaptation actions.
Thanks to Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences’s new “Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for Shorebird Habitat,” managers now have that capability. This innovative, Excel-based assessment and decision-making tool is the product of a partnership agreement between Manomet and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Northeast Region’s Division of Refuges. This partnership enabled Refuge Biologist Dorie Stolley to work for Manomet for a year, funded by the generosity of individual Manomet donors concerned about the impacts of climate change on shorebirds.
Refuges comprise more than half of the 83 WHSRN sites to date, therefore partnering with USFWS was a natural choice. With input from refuge managers and biologists, Stolley successfully designed the tool and piloted it at the three coastal refuges mentioned above. Participants at each workshop included federal, state, non-profit, and academic partners, as well as local refuge volunteer groups.
For Kevin Holcomb, Wildlife Biologist for E.B. Forsythe NWR, the workshops serve a dual purpose: “While the workshops help to inform future management decisions, they also provide a forum and opportunity to initiate a great dialogue with our federal, state, and local partners. We’re lucky to have such great relationships, and it’s already paying dividends.”
Stolley explains that “the tool guides participants through a series of worksheets and exercises designed to assess the vulnerability of coastal shorebird habitats to climate change, using three categories: effects of sea-level rise; effects of other climate-change variables, like predicted changes in temperature and precipitation; and the effects of increased frequency and intensity of storms. Once this is measured, the assessment outlines explicit strategies and adaptation options, and evaluates each option’s chances for success.”
Charles Duncan, Director of Manomet’s Shorebird Recovery Project, was involved in the design of the vulnerability assessment and sees it as a crucial addition to the WHSRN Site Assessment Tool, upon which it was modeled. “We must understand climate change vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies. Only then can we safeguard the investments of governments, individuals, and organizations involved in our hemispheric network of shorebird sites.” The development of this tool is an important step toward conserving vulnerable coastal sites that are critical for breeding, migrating, and wintering shorebirds. In particular, it also gives refuges a tangible means for addressing climate change issues in their planning documents (as recently mandated by the Federal government), such as Comprehensive Conservation Plans.
Many thanks to those who participated in this collaborative project, particularly the staff at Chincoteague, E.B. Forsythe, and Monomoy NWRs; partners and volunteers of Forsythe NWR; Graham Giese of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies; and Courtney Schupp of Assateague Island National Seashore.
A video of Dorie Stolley presenting an overview of the Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for Shorebird Habitat at the USFWS Northeast Regional Office can be viewed via the USFWS Video Archives [31](45 minutes, .wmv file; Note: there is a glitch between the 3- and 6-minute marker).
For more information, please contact Dorie Stolley (dorie_stolley@fws.gov [32]); Meredith Gutowski (mgutowski@manomet.org [33]), Conservation Specialist, Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences; or any of the three National Wildlife Refuge pilot sites.
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