Developing Tools for Conservation
As urban development expands in coastal areas, public land becomes increasingly important for providing migrating birds places to stop, rest, and refuel. Although some publicly owned lands in the Great Lakes basins support high concentrations of migratory birds during spring and fall, these properties may be degraded by invasive species that displace native plants migratory birds depend on for food and cover. Stopover habitat quality may also decline due to habitat fragmentation, a lack of vertical or horizontal vegetation structure affecting food and cover availability, and an inadequate surface water depth and/or quality.
Recognizing the urgency of establishing a network of protected sites, the Wisconsin Stopover Initiative invited local wildlife professionals, birders and other experts to attend workshops in 2006 to identify migratory stopover sites, which they knew well. These experts drew site boundaries on quadrangle maps and provided details about the habitats, surrounding land uses, and migratory bird uses at 223 migratory bird sites.
These data, combined with the literature and expert opinion, were used to construct spatial Geographic Information System (GIS) stopover habitat models that predict where migratory birds are likely to concentrate in each basin, thus helping to fill in gaps in our collective knowledge of Wisconsin’s stopover sites.
We produced GIS habitat models for three bird groups – landbirds (songbirds and other perching birds), waterfowl/waterbirds (swans, geese, ducks, and species like herons, rails, loons, etc.) and shorebirds – in each Great Lakes basin in Wisconsin. One important finding was that the Lake Michigan basin has a greater number of sites that need action to preserve stopover habitats than the Lake Superior basin. Therefore, our initial implementation efforts have been focused on projects along Lake Michigan. In the future, we will be working with partners in the Lake Superior basin to protect some of the most pristine stopover habitats in the Upper Great Lakes region.
See our Identified Sites page for a list of our top migratory bird concentration sites.