Waterbirds in the Mediterranean region

Fabien Verniest et al., "Exposure of Wetlands Important for Nonbreeding Waterbirds to Sea-Level Rise in the Mediterranean", 2024

ABSTRACT: Sea-level rise (SLR) is expected to cause major changes to coastal wetlands, which are among the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems and are critical for nonbreeding waterbirds. Because strategies for adaptation to SLR, such as nature-based solutions and designation of protected areas, can locally reduce the negative effects of coastal flooding under SLR on coastal wetlands, it is crucial to prioritize adaptation efforts, especially for wetlands of international importance for biodiversity. We assessed the exposure of coastal wetlands important for nonbreeding waterbirds to projected SLR along the Mediterranean coasts of 8 countries by modeling future coastal flooding under 7 scenarios of SLR by 2100 (from 44- to 161-cm rise) with a static inundation approach. Exposure to coastal flooding under future SLR was assessed for 938 Mediterranean coastal sites (≤30 km from the coastline) where 145 species of nonbreeding birds were monitored as part of the International Waterbird Census and for which the monitoring area was delineated by a polygon (64.3% of the coastal sites monitored in the Mediterranean region). Thirty-four percent of sites were threatened by future SLR, even under the most optimistic scenarios. Protected study sites and study sites of international importance for waterbirds were, respectively, 1.5 and 2 times more exposed to SLR than the other sites under the most optimistic scenario. Accordingly, we advocate for the development of a prioritization scheme to be applied to these wetlands for the implementation of strategies for adaptation to SLR to anticipate the effects of coastal flooding. Our study provides major guidance for conservation planning under global change in several countries of the Mediterranean region.

CITATION: Fabien Verniest et al., “Exposure of Wetlands Important for Nonbreeding Waterbirds to Sea-Level Rise in the Mediterranean,” Conservation Biology 38, no. 6 (2024): e14288, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14288.

Fabien Verniest et al., “Anticipating the Effects of Climate Warming and Natural Habitat Conversion on Waterbird Communities to Address Protection Gaps", 2023

ABSTRACT: Thermal adjustment of waterbird communities to climate warming is crucial but hampered by natural habitat conversion, increasing their climatic debt. As it is, in contrast, facilitated in protected areas, assessing the adequacy of the current protected areas network with respect to future climate and land-use changes and identifying priority sites to protect is of major importance. In this study, we assess the thermal adjustment limitations that non-breeding waterbird communities might experience by the end of the 21st century in the Mediterranean region to highlight priorities for wetland protection. Priorities were set by combining the exposure of waterbird communities to natural habitat conversion and climate warming with their thermal specialization. The latter was calculated using winter abundance data of 151 species from 2932 sites of the International Waterbird Census in 21 Mediterranean countries. Exposure was assessed using future projections of temperature and land-use under four CMIP6 scenarios (SSP1–2.6, SSP2–4.5, SSP3–7.0, and SSP5–8.5). We found that strictly protected areas are located in wetlands whose waterbird communities, without protection, would likely experience high limitations in thermal adjustment in the coming decades. This highlights that the location of existing protected areas may effectively support the thermal adjustment of waterbird communities to future climate warming. However, 490 sites considered at risk lack protection, including 32 sites of international importance for waterbirds, stressing the need to strengthen the protected areas network in these sites in priority. Our study provides important guidance for conservation planning in the Mediterranean region to support waterbird responses to climate change.

CITATION: Fabien Verniest et al., “Anticipating the Effects of Climate Warming and Natural Habitat Conversion on Waterbird Communities to Address Protection Gaps,” Biological Conservation 279 (March 1, 2023): 109939, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2023.109939.

Nadège Popoff et al., “Gap Analysis of the Ramsar Site Network at 50: Over 150 Important Mediterranean Sites for Wintering Waterbirds Omitted”, 2021

ABSTRACT: The Mediterranean Basin is a biodiversity hotspot. Wetlands make a key contribution to this status, but many of them remain outside the Ramsar network fifty years after the establishment of the Ramsar Convention. Here we evaluate the extent to which the Mediterranean Ramsar network covers wetlands of international importance for wintering waterbirds using the Ramsar Convention criteria 2 (species of conservation concern), 5 (> 20,000 waterbirds) and 6 (1% of a population). These criteria were applied to 4186 sites in 24 Mediterranean countries using counts of 145 wintering waterbird species from 1991 to 2017. We identified 161 sites of international importance for waterbirds that have not yet been declared as Ramsar sites, which could be added to the 180 current Mediterranean Ramsar sites established based on waterbird criteria (criteria 5 and/or 6). Among these sites, a subset of 32 very important sites reached double the required level for at least one criterion and 95 were not protected by any site conservation status. Coastal wetlands represented half of the Ramsar gap for waterbirds. We identified that an additional 1218 monitored sites could be provisionally considered as internationally important and thus require more survey efforts to assess their status. This study highlights a lack of participation of the Mediterranean countries to build the Ramsar network for wetland protection. Our results should help policymakers and managers to prioritize future Ramsar site designation, notably in the Middle East and Western European region where important gaps were identified.

CITATION: Nadège Popoff et al., “Gap Analysis of the Ramsar Site Network at 50: Over 150 Important Mediterranean Sites for Wintering Waterbirds Omitted,” Biodiversity and Conservation 30, no. 11 (September 1, 2021): 3067–85, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-021-02236-1.

Mohamed Dakki et al., “Imputation of Incomplete Large-Scale Monitoring Count Data via Penalized Estimation”, 2021

ABSTRACT: In biodiversity monitoring, large datasets are becoming more and more widely available and are increasingly used globally to estimate species trends and conservation status. These large-scale datasets challenge existing statistical analysis methods, many of which are not adapted to their size, incompleteness and heterogeneity. The development of scalable methods to impute missing data in incomplete large-scale monitoring datasets is crucial to balance sampling in time or space and thus better inform conservation policies.

We developed a new method based on penalized Poisson models to impute and analyse incomplete monitoring data in a large-scale framework. The method allows parameterization of (a) space and time factors, (b) the main effects of predictor covariates, as well as (c) space–time interactions. It also benefits from robust statistical and computational capability in large-scale settings.

The method was tested extensively on both simulated and real-life waterbird data, with the findings revealing that it outperforms six existing methods in terms of missing data imputation errors. Applying the method to 16 waterbird species, we estimated their long-term trends for the first time at the entire North African scale, a region where monitoring data suffer from many gaps in space and time series.

This new approach opens promising perspectives to increase the accuracy of species-abundance trend estimations. We made it freely available in the r package ‘lori’ (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lori) and recommend its use for large-scale count data, particularly in citizen science monitoring programmes.

CITATION: Mohamed Dakki et al., “Imputation of Incomplete Large-Scale Monitoring Count Data via Penalized Estimation,” Methods in Ecology and Evolution 12, no. 6 (2021): 1031–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13594.

M. S. Sayoud et al., “The First Coordinated Trans-North African Mid-Winter Waterbird Census: The Contribution of the International Waterbird Census to the Conservation of Waterbirds and Wetlands at a Biogeographical Level”, 2017

ABSTRACT: The International Waterbird Census (IWC) is one of the most widespread biodiversity monitoring programs, assessing waterbird populations in the framework of several international agreements including the African-Eurasian migratory Waterbirds Agreement and the Ramsar Convention. In 2013, the IWC was coordinated for the first time across the whole of North Africa with the aim of developing recommendations for methodological improvements to current design in North Africa, as well as to update the conservation status of certain waterbird populations and wetlands of international importance. We show that coordinating the IWC across all five North African countries significantly improves knowledge of waterbird population sizes and distribution and confirmed that current North African Ramsar wetlands perform well in conserving waterbirds. Nevertheless, biodiversity conservation could potentially be further enhanced by designating additional Ramsar sites, which this study contributes to identifying. We show that reducing sampling effort by half over the entire region would have been sufficient to cover 100% of the species richness of wintering waterbirds recorded and > 98% of the total abundance. Finally, we show that larger wetlands are insufficiently sampled. These findings call for revised sampling design in a coordinated, region-wide framework. The maintenance, optimization and reinforcement of the IWC program over time on a regional scale, with the collected data made available in a shared database, seems essential in order to make appropriate conservation decisions for waterbirds and wetlands in the future. Adding a temporal dimension to these analyses will be critical to confirm the patterns observed in the 2013 census.

CITATION: M. S. Sayoud et al., “The First Coordinated Trans-North African Mid-Winter Waterbird Census: The Contribution of the International Waterbird Census to the Conservation of Waterbirds and Wetlands at a Biogeographical Level,” Biological Conservation 206 (February 1, 2017): 11–20, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.12.005.

Dami L., “Confiance et Respect Des Besoins”, 2017