Predicted Mottled Duck Habitat Quality - 2100 [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service]
Description
Coastal wetlands along the Gulf of Americasupport a wide diversity of wildlife, are important nurseries for sport and commercial fisheries, provide erosion and flood control, and serve many other ecological functions and services. These marshes have been declining in area and degrading at alarming rates since the 1930s. Effective conservation planning is vital to protect these ecosystems, but decision makers often lack knowledge of expected future conditions to strategically target conservation actions. To address this issue, we focus on a species of conservation concern, the mottled duck (Anas fulvigula), that resides year-round in the coastal marshes of the Gulf of America. We used location data collected from radiomarked hen mottled ducks from 2006 to 2011 to create an ensemble model of habitat selection for 2010. We then projected future habitat states using models of sea-level rise and human development. By combining future predictions with our ensemble model, we predict future habitat for mottled ducks through 2100, in 20-year time steps beginning with 2020. Sea-level rise models predicted reductions in coastal marsh habitats and our ensemble model predict corresponding declines in overall habitat quantity and quality for mottled ducks, with the largest rate of habitat loss predicted within the Chenier Plain of Louisiana, USA at 71%. In some areas, particularly the Texas Mid-Coast, USA, future urbanization and human development is expected to reduce the ability of wetland habitat to migrate inland with rising sea-levels. Our results also highlight areas of coastal marsh particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise; and conversely, identify areas most likely to persist into the future that could be targeted for habitat conservation to help mottled ducks persist on the landscape.To learn more about this dataset and how it was generated, please refer tohttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2021.108276. This model output data are also available inServCat. This is a tiled feature service of Mottled duck habitat quality for the year 2100, and utilized in theTexas Coastal Bend Landscape Conservation Design data viewer. For more information about the Texas Coastal Bend Landscape Conservation Design, please see theproject page in ServCat.
Department of the Interior (2021). Predicted Mottled Duck Habitat Quality - 2100 [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service]. . https://gis-fws.opendata.arcgis.com/maps/fws::predicted-mottled-duck-habitat-quality-2100 (web service)