12:55 p.m., Dec. 17, 2010----Greg Shriver, assistant professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, has received a $300,000 collaborative grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct research on salt marsh birds from Maine to Virginia as part of the Saltmarsh Habitat and Avian Research Project (SHARP).

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The short-term goal of the SHARP project is to provide the information necessary for all states in the bird conservation region stretching from New England through the Mid-Atlantic coast to protect regionally important habitats for tidal marsh birds, especially the saltmarsh sparrow which is listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and has a limited breeding range from Virginia to Maine.

Said Shriver of the saltmarsh sparrow, “Given that the saltmarsh sparrow spends its' entire life in salt marsh habitats the species is extremely vulnerable to extinction over the next 50-100 years given even modest estimates of sea level rise during the same time period.”

The long-term goal is to provide a regionally consistent platform for tidal marsh bird monitoring in the face of anticipated sea-level rise and upland/watershed development, allowing states and conservation organizations to use the information to help “prioritize where to conserve potential salt marsh habitat as it transgresses inland.”

Specifically, the projects aims to produce population estimates for all bird species found in the high tidal marsh, including a global population estimate for saltmarsh sparrow, and identify regional population centers from Virginia to Maine.

It also plans to repeat historic surveys, where they exist, and fill in the gaps where surveys are lacking, to provide estimates of population change and to collect detailed demographic data at multiple points across the bird conservation region to model geographic variation in productivity and survival, specifically at Edwin B. Forsyth National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, existing sites in Connecticut and in Scarborough Marsh, Maine.

Additionally, the project will identify the most critical areas for the long-term preservation of the tidal marsh bird community within each state and build on an existing working group of local, state, and non-governmental organization (NGO) stakeholders to develop and test a pilot program for use in implementing the findings of the project throughout the region.

The University of Delaware will receive $300,000 of a total grant of $760,000. The study is a collaboration with researchers and graduate students from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, the University of Connecticut (UConn), the University of Maine and Maryland-Washington, D.C., Audubon.

Shriver said that he and Tom Hodgman, a biologist from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife coordinated a survey of salt marsh birds along the New England coast 10 years ago as part of his Ph.D. research, and that the SHARP project will revist some of those sites to estimate change in bird populations over time. It is very fortuitous that the collaborating universities are in perfect geographical harmony to perform the research.

“Chris Elphick at UConn has been building a salt marsh bird research program since the early 2000s and Brain Olsen is a new research faculty member at UMaine that recently completed his Ph.D. research on tidal marsh birds in Delaware Bay,” Shriver said. “By chance, with me located at UD, Chris at UConn, and Brian at UMaine, we created a perfect logistical collaboration to study the entire breeding range for saltmarsh sparrow.”

“We are all very excited about the potential, as are all the state and federal partners,” Shriver said of the grant. “This project is really the foundation for what will, hopefully, be a long-term salt marsh research and monitoring program coordinated from Maine to Virginia, an area with a significant amount of the global distribution of salt marsh habitat.”

University of Delaware graduate students involved in the project include Becky Kern, a doctoral student, who is overseeing the demographic study in New Jersey, and Whitney Wiest, a doctoral student, who is overseeing the study from Virginia to Maine, both in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

For more information on SHARP, visit the website.

Article by Adam Thomas