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Craig A. Davis

Wetland ecosystems are vital for maintaining global biodiversity, as they provide important stopover sites for many species of migrating wetland-associated birds. However, because weather determines their hydrologic cycles, wetlands are highly vulnerable to effects of climate change. Although changes in temperature and precipitation resulting from climate change are expected to reduce inundation of wetlands, few efforts have been made to quantify how these changes will influence the availability of stopover sites for migratory wetland birds. Additionally, few studies have evaluated how climate change will influence interannual variability or the frequency of extremes in wetland availability. For spring and fall...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Within interior North America, erratic weather patterns and heterogeneous wetland complexes cause wide spatio-temporal variation in the resources available to migrating shorebirds. Identifying the pattern-generating components of landscape-level resources and the scales at which shorebirds respond to these patterns will better facilitate conservation efforts for these species. We constructed descriptive models that identified weather variables associated with creating the spatio-temporal patterns of shorebird habitat in ten landscapes in north-central Oklahoma. We developed a metric capable of measuring the dynamic composition and configuration of shorebird habitat in the region and used field data to empirically...
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Stopover use by migrating shorebirds is affected by patch-level characteristics of habitat, but the relative influence of broadscale factors is poorly understood. We conducted surveys of ten 10-km-radius landscapes in north-central Oklahoma from 2007 through 2009 to examine the influence of the amount and composition of wetland habitats and surrounding land cover on shorebird use during migration. We used generalized linear modeling and an information-theoretic framework to identify factors that best explained species richness, total abundance, and abundance of four groups of shorebirds classified by breeding status and migration distance. Total abundance and richness both increased with the area of wetland...
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