Netherlands Polar Data Center

Summary

Long-distance migratory shorebirds that breed on Arctic tundra connect the Polar region with the rest of the world. Such birds tend to be of conservation concern because of (1) the predicted climate changes in Arctic environments and (2) the already ongoing widespread population declines. So far, we have no way to tell the importance of demographic problems in the Arctic (lower reproduction) relative to happenings in the rest of the flyway. Here the sanderling flyway study system developed from The Netherlands over the last decade, comes to the 'rescue' for conservationists and policy-makers. We propose to study annual and seasonal survival and the timing of migration of a High Arctic shorebird species, sanderling Calidris alba, to essay the bottlenecks in their population biology. We will do so using 53,400 observations of 5,550 sanderlings that were individually marked at seven sites along the East Atlantic flyway between Greenland and Ghana in mark-recapture analyses of seasonal and annual survival of individuals wintering at different distances to the Greenlandic breeding grounds. We will use observations of colour-ringed individuals during the migration periods, stable isotope analyses and geolocators to search for intra-specific differences in timing of migration dependent on annual migration distance. This study will indicate whether migration is a period of increased mortality (directly or via carry-over effects), and whether a declining reproductive success is caused by late arrivals in the Greenlandic breeding grounds, where strong advancements of the peak in food resources are now taking place.

People involved

Datasets

Publications

Niels M. Schmidt, Bess Hardwick, et al., 2017. Interaction webs in arctic ecosystems: Determinants of arctic change? Ambio 46 (S1), 12-25

Martin Bulla, Mihai Valcu, et al., 2016. Unexpected diversity in socially synchronized rhythms of shorebirds. Nature 540 (7631), 109-113

Emily L. Weiser, Richard B. Lanctot, et al., 2016. Effects of geolocators on hatching success, return rates, breeding movements, and change in body mass in 16 species of Arctic-breeding shorebirds. Movement Ecology 4 (1)

Jeroen Reneerkens, Niels Martin Schmidt, et al., 2016. Effects of food abundance and early clutch predation on reproductive timing in a high Arctic shorebird exposed to advancements in arthropod abundance. Ecology and Evolution 6 (20), 7375-7386

Pedro M. Lourenço, José A. Alves, et al., 2016. Influence of age and sex on winter site fidelity of sanderlings Calidris alba. PeerJ 4 (2016-09-28), e2517

A.H. Jelle Loonstra, Theunis Piersma, & Jeroen Reneerkens, 2016. Staging Duration and Passage Population Size of Sanderlings in the Western Dutch Wadden Sea. Ardea 104 (1), 49-61

Jesse R. Conklin, Jeroen Reneerkens, et al., 2016. Low genetic differentiation between Greenlandic and Siberian Sanderling populations implies a different phylogeographic history than found in Red Knots. Journal of Ornithology 157 (1), 325-332

Helena K. Wirta, Eero J. Vesterinen, et al., 2015. Exposing the structure of an Arctic food web. Ecology and Evolution 5 (17), 3842-3856