Home range size in Great Lakes Piping Plovers: implications for conservation and management.

Abstract

The Great Lakes population of Piping Plovers is the smallest and most heavily managed breeding assemblage of this endangered shorebird. As plover nesting beaches are increasingly threatened by development, conservation of adequate shoreline is essential to the survival of these birds. I hypothesized that plovers nesting in areas with high levels of human disturbance (measured by counting footprints along shoreline transects) would have larger home ranges than plovers nesting where such disturbance was minimal. I examined the home range sizes of eleven breeding pairs of Piping Plovers in Michigan (through two estimation methods), and the data support my hypothesis. Although there is much variation in the home ranges (plus the more shoreline available to the birds, the more they will utilize), the level of human disturbance was found to the most significant predictor of size. The positions of all plovers were plotted on composite aerial videography images and are included in the Appendix. In addition, the implications of these findings for conservation and management of Piping Plovers are discussed.