Abstracts

Presented by Kevin M. Ringelman - Email: kringelman@agcenter.lsu.edu

Over the past decade, the United States has seen a boom in petroleum extraction from unconventional sources, particularly the Bakken shale formation in northwestern North Dakota. The Bakken overlaps with the Prairie Pothole Region, the most critical habitat in North America for breeding ducks, where fracking has the potential to impact more than a million duck pairs in the United States alone. Here, we evaluated the effect of oil and gas development on nesting ducks from 20152018 across 5 counties in North Dakota. Using data from ~4,000 nests we found that nest survival was higher at sites composed of a higher percentage of grassland, and for nests found closer to major highways. We found no effect of any metric of oil and gas activity on duck nest survival. Using survival-corrected estimates of nest density, we found that sites surrounded by more oil wells within 10002500 m had lower nest densities. Given the average number of wells (3.15 wells) within 1500 m of a site, nest density was predicted to decline by 18% relative to sites with no development. However, within a nesting field, we found no evidence that ducks were avoiding infrastructure at smaller spatial scales. Our results add to a growing literature documenting the negative effects of unconventional oil extraction on breeding birds, and highlight additional research needs on other aspects of duck breeding ecology.