Abstracts

Presented by Marcel Darveau - Email: m_darveau@ducks.ca

The eastern population of Sandhill Crane (Antigone canadensis) is showing an increasing trend since the 1980s, and its geographic range is expanding. More opportunistic than most waterfowl species, this wetland-nester feeds also in agricultural land. In Qubec, crop damage seems particularly important in the Boreal Transition Zone, where agricultural lands are close to extensive areas of wetlands. The aim of this project is to better understand the habitat use by the Sandhill Crane during breeding season in the context of global change to inform population management and agricultural practices. Our objectives are to (i) identify the factors explaining crane distribution in Qubecs landscapes, (ii) construct a spatiotemporal model using existing historical data, and (iii) project this model in the future according to different climate change scenarios. We combined three data sets in occupancy models to estimate changes in the crane distribution after accounting for detection probability. These data sets consisted of (i) the Breeding Waterfowl Plot Survey of Eastern Canada, a helicopter survey conducted annually by the Canadian Wildlife Service since 1990; (ii) the Second Breeding Bird Atlas of Southern Qubec, a 5-year citizen science project; and (iii) the online citizen-science database eBird. The 10 x 10 km atlas grid was used to divide the 540,000 km study area into spatial units. Preliminary analyses indicate that annual (April to June) detection probability was 0.80 for CWS surveys, 0.12 for the Atlas, and 0.25 for eBird. Our occupancy models allow the production of maps that provide a more complete coverage of the study area and time periods, leading to a better understanding of current and future colonization and extinction patterns of this rapidly increasing species (12% annual increase from 2000-2016).