This study investigates the rapid decline of black tern (Chlidonias niger) over eight years in one of Michigan’s largest colonies, Lake St. Clair.
1. Nesting Success Model: A multiple logistic regression with a binomial (logit-link) fit using the glm() function from the ‘stats’ package in R (55) to determine the influence of habitat and biological predictors on nesting survival.
2. ArcMap visualization of Nesting Success: To visualize the geographic extent of the habitat’s potential to predispose nests’ vulnerability, the coefficients and intercept from our selected GLM were applied to raster layers in ArcMap using the Raster Calculator Tool.
3. Population Change & Habitat Extent: To quantify sub-colony breeding pair population size and their response to changes in sub-colony habitat in the geospatial model, we applied a general linear mixed model (GLMM) using the lmer() function from the ‘lme4’ package in R (55). Predictor variables were chosen a priori, and included the area of open water, uninhabitable vegetation (NDVI>0.72), any habitable area, and area with >50% hatch success.
Fuller, J., Rowan, E., Landgraf, A., Alofs, K., Foufopoulos, J., Gronewold, A., (2021). Collapse of a Black Tern Colony (Chlidonias niger) as a Result of Climate Change Driven Lake-Level Extremes and Anthropogenic Habitat Alteration [Data set]. University of Michigan - Deep Blue. and Fuller, J., et al. (2021). Shorebird colony collapses under climate driven lake-level rise and anthropogenic stressors. Forthcoming.
Wind exposure is a key physical driver of coastal systems in aquatic environments influencing circulation and wave dynamics. A measure of wind exposure is fetch, the distance over which wind can travel across open water. In large lake systems, such as the Laurentian Great Lakes, estimating fetch has proved to be difficult due to their vast size and complex topobathymetry. Here we describe the development of two spatially discrete indicators of exposure to provide a more accurate indicator of influence of wind exposure in the nearshore of the Laurentian Great Lakes. We summarized wind data from offshore buoys and leveraged existing tools to calculate effective fetch and relative exposure index (effective fetch scaled by mean wind speed) at a 30 m grid cell resolution. We validated these models by comparing our exposure maps to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wave Information Studies models and found general agreement. These exposure maps are available for public download for the years 2004-2014.
