Region Wide Colonial Waterbird Monitoring (Project ID: 257)

After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, federal and state agencies came together to form the Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustee Council. The Council studied the effects of the oil spill and continues to pursue projects intended to restore the Gulf of Mexico to the condition it would have been in if the spill had not happened. The Trustee Implementation Groups will develop restoration projects and plans to accomplish the significant work needed for the Gulf. Development of these projects is guided by the programmatic restoration plan finalized in 2016 as part of a legal settlement with BP for up to $8.8 billion.

Colonial waterbirds (CWB) are well known to respond to the dynamic and ever-shifting spatio-temporal distribution of breeding sites and foraging areas in the northern Gulf of Mexico (nGOM) both within and among seasons. As future CWB restoration projects will be implemented throughout the nGOM, a cumulative monitoring approach would be beneficial in quantifying effects (e.g., benefits) of restoration at the scale of the entire nGOM. Due to the large geographic scale of the restoration effort, the lengthy timeframe by which restoration funding is being allocated, and the capabilities of colonial waterbirds to move among different breeding localities (including across state and international lines), a Regionwide monitoring effort which emphasizes the use of comparable methods and protocols would document effects of restoration to some colonial waterbird populations.

This Monitoring and Adaptive Management (MAM) activity utilizes established methods and protocols which have been successfully implemented throughout a portion of the nGOM. These activities are one means by which Trustees will document and partially evaluate CWB breeding population performance at a Regionwide scale. It is envisioned that these efforts will be fully integrated with established, ongoing, smaller-scale monitoring programs thereby providing Trustees with a more comprehensive means to characterize benefits generated from Deepwater Horizon (DWH) bird restoration activities. Other potential benefits associated with this MAM activity include: (1) population trend data necessary to contextualize outcomes from restoration activities throughout the Gulf; (2) document outcomes of restoration projects that have already been implemented that lack a current bird monitoring component; and (3) partially inform future restoration decision-making by informing the cost-effectiveness and the local and regional context of proposed projects during restoration planning.

This activity will estimate select colonial waterbird data endpoints (relative abundance, distribution trends and breeding status) at a Regionwide scale. This activity involves:

(1) new aerial nest surveys and data comparison (2021)

(2) nest dotting analysis and data comparison of newly collected data (2021)

(3) nest dotting analysis of and data comparison of previously collected data (2015), and

(4) multi-year summaries (2010-13, 2015, 2018 and 2021) and reports including Trustee review of reports and analyses developed as a result of this activity.

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