Bird Satellite Tracking Revealed Critical Protection Gaps in East Asian⁻Australasian Flyway.

Yifei Jia,Guangchun Lei,Aojie Zuo,Cai Lu,Jialin Lei,Qing Zeng,Hong Zhang,Linlu Shi,Li Wen,Yan Zhou

doi:10.3390/ijerph16071147

Abstract

Most migratory birds depend on stopover sites, which are essential for refueling during migration and affect their population dynamics. In the East Asian–Australasian Flyway (EAAF), however, the stopover ecology of migratory waterfowl is severely under-studied. The knowledge gaps regarding the timing, intensity and duration of stopover site usages prevent the development of effective and full annual cycle conservation strategies for migratory waterfowl in EAAF. In this study, we obtained a total of 33,493 relocations and visualized 33 completed spring migratory paths of five geese species using satellite tracking devices. We delineated 2,192,823 ha as the key stopover sites along the migration routes and found that croplands were the largest land use type within the stopover sites, followed by wetlands and natural grasslands (62.94%, 17.86% and 15.48% respectively). We further identified the conservation gaps by overlapping the stopover sites with the World Database on Protected Areas (PA). The results showed that only 15.63% (or 342,757 ha) of the stopover sites are covered by the current PA network. Our findings fulfil some key knowledge gaps for the conservation of the migratory waterbirds along the EAAF, thus enabling an integrative conservation strategy for migratory water birds in the flyway.

Highlights

The conservation of migratory birds has gained new momentum across the globe [1], mainly due to the recognition of their irreplaceable ecological functions and services [2], and because of the widespread declines in their populations [3], and more sophisticated tools to track their movement across the landscape [4]
We focused on the spring migration as spring stopovers are critical for the population dynamics of Arctic geese [43], as they affect directly the reproduction success and survival of juveniles
Our results demonstrated that the geese wintering in the Yangtze floodplains shared a common path initially to the wetlands and estuaries around Bohai Bay, from where two geographically distinct passages could be identified: (1) the narrower northwest passage was mainly taken by the short-distance migrants

Summary

Introduction

The conservation of migratory birds has gained new momentum across the globe [1], mainly due to the recognition of their irreplaceable ecological functions and services [2], and because of the widespread declines in their populations [3], and more sophisticated tools to track their movement across the landscape [4]. The scale and intensity of threats on migratory birds have increased since the. 1980s with rapid economic development and human population growth [5,6]. These threats include climate change [7,8], habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation [9], over-harvesting and illegal hunting [10], pollution and invasive species as well as emerging diseases [11], among others. Public Health 2019, 16, 1147; doi:10.3390/ijerph16071147 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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