Connecting breeding and wintering grounds of Neotropical migrant songbirds using stable hydrogen isotopes: a call for an isotopic atlas of migratory connectivity

Abstract

There is an overdue and urgent need to establish patterns of migratory connectivity linking breeding grounds, stopover sites, and wintering grounds of migratory birds. Such information allows more effective application of conservation efforts by applying focused actions along movement trajectories at the population level. Stable isotope methods, especially those using stable hydrogen isotope abundance in feathers ( 2 Hf) combined with Bayesian assignment techniques incorporating prior information such as relative abundance of breeding birds, now provide a fast and reliable means of establishing migratory connectivity, especially for Neotropical migrants that breed in North America and molt prior to fall migration. Here we demonstrate how opportunistic sampling of feathers of 30 species of wintering birds in Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, regions that have typically been poorly sampled for estimating migratory connectivity, can be assigned to breeding areas in North America through both advanced spatial assignment to probability surfaces and through simpler map lookup approaches. Incorporating relative abundance information from the North American Breeding Bird Survey in our Bayesian assignment models generally resulted in a reduction in potential assignment areas on breeding grounds. However, additional tools to constrain longitude such as DNA markers or other isotopes would be desirable for establishing breeding or molt origins of species with broad longitudinal distributions. The isotope approach could act as a rapid means of establishing basic patterns of migratory connectivity across numerous species and populations. We propose a large-scale coordinated sampling effort on the wintering grounds to establish an isotopic atlas of migratory connectivity for North American Neotropical migrants and suggest that isotopic variance be considered as a valuable metric to quantify migratory connectivity. This initiative could then act as a strategic template to guide further efforts involving stable isotopes, light-sensitive geolocators, and other technologies.