PROJECTING THE BENEFITS OF TIDAL MARSH RESTORATION FOR BIRD HABITAT IN THE SACRAMENTO–SAN JOAQUIN DELTA OF CALIFORNIA | |||
| Kristen E Dybala; Point Blue Conservation Science; kdybala@pointblue.org; Dennis Jongsomjit, Megan Elrod, Hilary Allen, Sarah Estrella, Cory Overton, Jason Riggio, Rose Snyder, Julian Wood | |||
Forecasting the impacts of landscape changes on multiple conservation goals is essential to informing conservation strategies and priorities. In the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, providing bird habitat and continuing to support the abundant, diverse bird community is included among the goals for protecting, restoring, and enhancing the ecosystem. To support these goals and multi-benefit decision-making, we developed distribution models for 7 bird species associated with tidal marsh habitat, combining point count surveys, secretive marsh bird surveys, and detections from automated recording units (ARUs). We predicted the current distribution of each species on the landscape and applied a Zonation spatial prioritization algorithm to identify important areas to protect, enhance, and manage to provide the most benefit to tidal marsh birds in the Delta. We then used these models to evaluate the potential effect of future tidal marsh restoration scenarios on the extent of suitable habitat for each species. The results provide insights into the expected magnitude of the additional habitat gained by meeting tidal marsh habitat targets. Our models are being incorporated into the DeltaMultipleBenefits R package, where they can be readily applied to evaluate customized scenarios and expand multi-benefit approaches to managing the Delta. | |||
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