Rutgers University and Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey have partnered on a project entitled Protection of Critical Beach-nesting Bird Habitats in the Wake of Severe Coastal Storms under the North Atlantic LCC coordinated Hurricane Sandy Disaster Mitigation Funds beach resiliency projects. The project uses species’ distribution modeling to examine the landscape-scale habitat variables that influence beach-nesting bird habitat selection. The original project had the following primary goals: 1) catalogue suitable breeding habitat criteria for NJ’s beach-nesting birds; 2) quantify changes in beach-nesting bird habitat resulting from Superstorm Sandy; 3) evaluate the impact of anthropogenic storm recovery efforts on beach-nesting bird habitat; and 4) develop an assessment protocol to identify and prioritize for protection of new breeding habitat created by severe coastal storms. The species being addressed are piping plovers, American oystercatchers, least terns, and black skimmers.
After viewing the results produced for the New Jersey coastline, FWS and Rutgers agreed it would be valuable to apply the same approach to the south shore of Long Island, from Breezy Point to Montauk Point, N.Y. A small modification was made to the budget to support extra staff time needed to manually digitize remotely sensed imagery. The digital imagery was used to create a comparable high-resolution land use/land cover layer for landscape scale habitat analyses on Long Island to that which was already available for the New Jersey coast. In addition, staff time was needed to generate model inputs depicting locations of various beach management zones (e.g. open or closed to various types of recreation, stabilization or other alterations) and beach-nesting bird nesting sites.
