Island-wide Conservation in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Overview
In 2021 we developed an island-wide acoustic monitoring program, covering ~900 sites in the Puerto Rico archipelago (including the island of Mona, Desecheo, Culebra, and Vieques) to create a population baseline for bird and frog species of greatest conservation need.
This project aims to significantly broaden the spatial and temporal parameters of our biodiversity survey initiative across the entirety of Puerto Rico until 2024. The overarching objective is to comprehensively elucidate avian presence patterns throughout the region.
Partners
Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales de Puerto Rico ( PR DRNA )
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ( USFWS )
Para la Naturaleza
Objectives
The proposed work will allow us to reliably and cost-effectively monitor birds across long-term timescales
Allow us to evaluate species response to protected areas, restoration and agroforestry sites and understand population dynamics and species distribution which is crucial for conservation planning and biodiversity preservation.
Help in prioritizing conservation efforts, identifying vulnerable species and ecosystems, and anticipating range shifts and habitat loss
Understanding species' adaptive potential and vulnerabilities aids in developing resilience strategies and promoting the long-term survival of species and ecosystems in the face of climate change.
Our proposed expansion will allow us to incorporate restoration sites, always-suitable areas, and agroforestry into species distribution models.
In this proposal, we aim to combine bird occupancy information from complementary data sources (e.g., acoustic monitoring, eBird, the Puerto Rico Breeding Bird Atlas, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)) to comprehensively assess the population status and distribution of birds across the archipelago in order to overcome limitations associated with individual data sources and obtain a holistic understanding of avian communities, informing effective conservation strategies and management practices.
We aim to understand how different land-use types contribute to providing safe havens in climate change scenarios.
The detailed temporal information (5am to 6pm) collected over 6 months (January to June) from each site will be used to fit dynamic occupancy models that estimate colonization and extinction rates, through which we can identify areas of high turnover, prioritize conservation efforts, and assess the effectiveness of management interventions.
Implementation
We selected a subset of ~200 sites in and around six Protected Areas (Guánica, Guilarte, Maricao, Río Abajo, Susúa, and Toro Negro) to be re-sampled in 2022, 2023, and 2024 as part of the first phase of a long-term acoustic monitoring program aimed to detect animal population and community trends and patterns that could be used to inform conservation action for DRNA and USFWS.
First we will deploy acoustic monitoring stations across different habitats and land-use types in Puerto Rico (n = 400) across the wet and dry seasons (6 months).
Acoustic data was used to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically detect 40 species of interest (27 birds and 13 frogs).
The original ˜900 survey sites from 2021 were to complement existing and past biodiversity sampling efforts on the island.
Incorporating restoration sites, secondary forests, and agroforestry into species distribution models is vital for accurate predictions and effective conservation strategies.
A hallmark of this proposal is the integration of passive acoustic monitoring with inputs derived from museum records and citizen science efforts. This data integration is anticipated to improve species distribution modeling, constituting a pivotal innovation within this project.
Resurvey and Long-Term Ecoacoustic Monitoring: It allows us to detect changes, such as declines or recoveries, in animal populations and assess the effectiveness of conservation interventions. Resurveys also help identify emerging threats, track the impacts of habitat loss or fragmentation, and inform adaptive management strategies, selected through meticulous analysis of the cumulative count of Species of Greatest Conservation Needs (SGCN) identified through our preceding research endeavors (datasets from 2021, 2022 and 2023). This approach guarantees our emphasis on sites that hold paramount importance in terms of conservation, thus underscoring our commitment to maintaining and enhancing ecological integrity.
Always suitable areas for species of greatest conservation need: Our always-suitable areas approach focuses on areas that consistently provide safe havens for species under changing climate and may provide the best chances for species' survival under future climate change.
Agroforestry sites: By integrating trees, shrubs, and crops in agricultural landscapes, agroforestry systems create diverse and interconnected ecosystems that support the needs of both domesticated animals and native wildlife.
Impact
We have found:
1) 98 species (27 endemics, 19 threatened, 16 invasives)
2) the distribution of several bird and frog species are positively
affected by precipitation and proportion of canopy cover
3) invasive species distribution is negatively associated with places with old forest and high canopy cover 4) a large portion of always-suitable areas for birds is outside of current protected areas (> 75%), indicating that present protected areas will not suffice to safeguard bird species under climate change.
Our results highlight the need for long-term monitoring programs to improve our ability to disentangle the effects of climate change on species distribution and rally all our biodiversity stakeholders to the need to be creative, proactive, and collaborative in identifying and protecting suitable habitats for species in climate change scenarios.
This integrative approach will yield a comprehensive dataset, enabling us to generate high-resolution distribution maps, identify key hotspots of avian diversity, and detect trends in population changes.
This project's methodologies can serve as a model for similar bird conservation studies globally, showcasing the power of data integration in advancing our knowledge of avian populations and their ecological significance.
