Project Portugal 2030

Summary

The main goal of this project is to contribute towards halting and reversing biodiversity loss by promoting the conservation of migratory shorebirds, addressing a challenge identified by local authorities at the regional level and providing a template to monitor and guide conservation of these species and their habitats across their flyway wide winter distribution range. Tackling such a massive global challenge from a bottom-up perspective, this project aims to combine for the first time methods of remote sensing and movement ecology to establish a monitoring scheme and deliver practical outputs to guide and implement conservation of these migratory species and their wintering habitats. It is subdivided into four specific objectives that go beyond the state of the art in determining habitat quality, which for these species is based on harvestable food biomass (i.e. macrobenthos biomass accessible to each shorebird species) in a given wintering site, often used to determine its carrying capacity (8). By using applied ecology methodologies and merging earth observation information and GPS tracking with ACC behaviour data of individuals, this project will quantify intertidal habitat quality at an unprecedented scale (i.e. sub-habitat level), incorporating not only harvestable biomass, but also costs of thermoregulation and movement, converting both into and energy surface, and establishing important baselines (e.g. association between habitat quality and its usage for feeding). In addition, this project will also innovate in the sense that it will: (a) provide tools to monitor shorebird habitat quality remotely from GPS and ACC data, defining relevant the metrics to do so, and which can then be used in other wintering sites across the flyway range; and (b) produce outputs (e.g. maps) to guide short and long term conservation actions and communicate these to the relevant authorities, taking advantage of the teams’ close relationships with conservation statutory agencies and their plan (and expertise) in communicating and disseminating research outputs to relevant stakeholders. In short, the project will not only publish academic papers in the area of conservation biology stating that “the new knowledge created here may be helpful in tackling biodiversity loss”, it will de facto crossover and provide specific information to the relevant conservation actors to guide their actions. Each one of the four objectives is achieved by accomplishing the tasks (with the same title) and the activities described therein, all of which designed according to SMART methodology. Despite the innovative nature of the project approach and creation of new metrics that emerge from the merging of methods and tools from different disciplines, team members are confident that all objectives will be met as their combined experience will be more valuable than the sum of the parts.