An assessment of wintering bird use of Wetland Reserve Program restored wetlands in California using NEXRAD weather radar

Collaborators: Wylie Barrow and Lori Randall (USGS National Wetlands Research Center), and Joe Fleskes (USGS Western Ecological Research Center)

The Central Valley of California is one of the most important waterfowl wintering areas in North America. The national network of Doppler weather surveillance radars routinely detects a variety of bird movements and holds enormous potential for rapidly and remotely assessing bird distributions over broad spatial and temporal extents across the United States. Our objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of Wetland Reserve Program (WRP) restoration projects in the Central Valley in terms of their ability to support wintering waterfowl by assessing the change in bird use of WRP sites before and after restoration using archived radar data. We will develop methods to quantify bird density from radar data collected near the onset of routine and synchronized feeding-flights of waterfowl shortly after sunset during peak and validate these radar measures with ground observations of waterfowl. Another objective is to identify habitat and landscape features that are most important in sustaining wintering waterfowl populations by assessing the relative importance of local WRP site characteristics and l