Why studying shorebirds?
Migratory shorebirds link distant geographic areas across the world with challenging movements perfectly scheduled with the optimal environmental conditions they seek throughout the annual-cycle to survive and raise their offspring.
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Each year, millions of migrant shorebirds, leave their high-latitude nesting sites and entail epic journeys towards warmer and productive wintering grounds. During the winter they are spread in virtually all world wetlands, from the increasingly disturbed and humanized European estuaries to many pristine tropical environments along the West African coast. Despite being seasonal at their wintering and stopover areas, shorebirds are often present in exceptionally large numbers, making them pivotal predators with the potential to induce significant seasonal impacts in the structure and functioning of intertidal ecossystems.
Throughout the year, shorebirds have to constantly adapt their body and behaviour to contrasting temperatures, different food sources and predators, as well as to specific and particularly demanding requirements of breeding and migratory periods. This already hard task is being jeopardized by the crescent human pressure, with half of the migratory shorebird populations declining worldwide.
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How do shorebirds connect breeding and wintering areas? Which are their particular routes and schedules? Is trophic plasticity key to explore so many different environments? Which is the ecological role of shorebirds in tidal food webs? Are habitat loss and climate change altering the migratory behaviour of shorebirds?
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This is the magic world we aim to unveil.
Shorebirds as indicators of the quality of estuarine environments
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Shorebirds are conspicuous elements of virtually all estuaries during the winter. Many species of shorebirds feed on the macro-invertebrates in the intertidal sediments of estuaries during the low tide, and seek refuge in adjoining areas for resting and maintenance activities during the high tide. Hence, wintering shorebirds have the potential to act as integrative indicators of the quality of estuarine areas, reflecting not only the quality of the sediment flats, on which they depend for feeding, but also that of the surrounding habitats, which they seek as refuge. Estuaries and their adjoining habitats, are currently under threat by an ever increasing human presence and disturbance. As a consequence, several long-term monitoring programs have revealed sustained population declines of many shorebirds species in Europe and elsewhere.
Some estuaries are also routinely used by very large numbers of actively migrating shorebirds. Each year, the fate of hundred of thousands migrants depends on the existence of a network of good quality stopover sites along their migratory flyway, which they use to rebuild their body condition between the successive legs of their migratory trajectories.
It is increasingly important to be able to monitor and maintain the quality of estuaries to ensure the conservation of shorebird populations.
