Water Resource Collections and Archives

Comprehensive Survey of Shorebirds Using San Francisco Bay

Organization: PRBO Conservation Science
2007 Grant Recipient - All Bay Area Counties

Purpose

With their partners, Audubon California, USGS, and the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, PRBO conducted a comprehensive shorebird survey of San Francisco Bay, replicating a survey from 15 years ago. With their survey in November 2006 and the survey in November 2007, they measured changes in the distribution and abundance of shorebirds in four regions of the San Francisco Bay estuary over the past two decades and communicated these changes to key partners.

Shorebird populations were largely stable in this analysis, which suggests that overall San Francisco Bay has remained an important site for wintering shorebirds over the last 20 years. Whether this Bay-wide stability reflects stability in shorebird populations across a larger spatial extent is not known.

This comprehensive shorebird survey was an important component of what has become the Pacific Flyway Shorebird Survey, an effort across the pacific Flyway to guide the management and conservation of wintering shorebirds in the Pacific Flyway. Read more ...

Documents

• Abundance and Distribution of Wintering Shorebirds in San Francisco Bay, 1990-2008: Population Change and Informing Future Monitoring. Draft Final Report.
  Julian Wood, Gary Page, Matt Reiter, Leonard Liu, PRBO Conservation Science, and Caitlin Robinson-Nilsen, San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. October 2010. (56 pp.)

Contact for the Project

Dr. Matt Reiter
Avian and Wetland Quantitative Ecologist
Pacific Coast and Central Valley Group
PRBO Conservation Science
Phone: (707) 781-2555 ext.351
E-mail: MReiter@prbo.org
Website: www.prbo.org/pfss