So in the Central Valley, we once had a vast system
of about four million acres of wetlands and wetland-like features,
this integrated mosaic of wet stuff. And since that time,
we've lost about 95% of those habitats.
[chime] California's Central Valley is home to one of the largest agro-ecosystems
on the planet. Since the loss of the wetlands, migratory birds
are now very dependant on what's happening on that agricultural land
to find places to forage and to spend the winter.
So our work with farmers is really an integral part of the flyway.
Waterbirds need water to give them access to a lot
of the food resources. Shorebirds in particular eat a lot of the
aquatic invertebrates that grow in the water. And so, by knowing where the water
is, we can really maximize the value of the
restoration and conservation we do for waterbirds in the Central Valley.
The NASA and USGS data that are available allow us to make
the distribution maps on the probability that water might be in any given pixel –
so that's a 30-meter by 30-meter cell anywhere within the Central Valley of California.
The real value of the satellite, and Landsat archive,
is that we are able to look at the water distribution at a very fine spatial scale
so that's a 30- by 30-meter pixel, which is really relevant in terms of
understanding habitat for migratory water birds. We're also able then to look at that
across a very large spatial extent of the entire Central Valley.
Point Blue Conservation Science has been one of our
trusted conservation partners at the Nature Conservancy for many many years
and so I reached out to our partners at Point Blue and we started working
together on these Landsat data to try and perfect ways that
we could use to predict water availability in the Central Valley.
So simultaneously, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
was really making great strides in using citizen science data
to predict when and where birds would occur.
I'm Steve Kelling, I'm the Director of Information sciences
at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
I run a project called eBird.
eBird is a citizen scientist project that engages the public
to submit checklists of their bird observations
to a central database.
Currently we collect about a 100 million observations per year.
What makes eBird unique, though,
is that because we collect data year round, we can essentially
describe the entire life history of a bird or a population
of birds as the move throughout the landscape.
So when we think of how a bird moves across a hemisphere,
we can use MODIS landcover information to allow us
to make these habitat relationships
with particular species of birds.
And with that kind of relationship we can then make predictions
in areas where we don't have information about birds
but we do have information about the habitats that they're in.
What we're able to show
was that there was a high correlation between
abundance of shorebirds
with rice farming
and then go out to the rice fields and feed during the day
and then go to the refuges at night to roost.
And the a-ha moment really came with putting
these two datasets together and realizing that there were some horrible mis-matches.
So we had models predicting high abundances of birds
at times when there was not very much water.
And that made us realize there was something we could do out there to make that place better
for birds at that time.
Our program Bird Returns allows us to work directly with farmers to help them help us create bird habitat.
Rice farmers typically flood their fields
to grow the crop, so we knew there was water available
just not at the right times and places to help the birds. So by working with
rice farmers we were able to essentially rent their fields
for a couple weeks a year, and instead of growing rice, create the conditions
which would grow birds or create habitat for wintering birds.
Look, these birds are migratory superheroes.
They mystify us. The shorebirds we work with are breeding in Alaska
and wintering as far south as southern Peru.
We're talking up to 20,000 kilometers each year, some of these small birds
are flying. So it behooves us to
help them on their journey, provide this food resource for them
but to do it in a responsible way that again shows our respect
for the limited resource that water is, today, in the Western United States.
Bird Returns is having a lot of impact,
both for wetland conditions and for farmers, but also for the birds.
And we're monitoring birds on all of the fields that we flood
out there and we're comparing those with bird observations on fields that aren't flooded.
So we're finding densities that are 30 times
greater on our fields than on the comparison control fields.
The ability of them to use refuge lands and
a compatible agricultural landscape allows us to manage
the whole valley as an integrated matrix.
This is really the power of using these kinds of data to make conservation decisions.
Not only for the Nature Conservancy but also for
public lands and private land managers.