Habitat-Suitability Model for the Yellow Rail (Coturnicops noveboracensis) in the Northern Gulf Coast of Alabama and Mississippi, USA

Abstract

The yellow rail (Coturnicops noveboracensis) is a migratory bird of high conservation priority throughout its range and winters across the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains regions of the southeastern United States. Although the winter ecology of this species has been recently explored, no studies have addressed their distribution and abundance in relation to suitable habitat capable of supporting this species during winter along the northern Gulf Coast of Alabama and Mississippi. The objectives of this study were to develop a habitat-suitability model for yellow rail wintering in the northern Gulf Coast of Alabama and Mississippi. We then used this model to evaluate the distribution of habitat suitable for supporting yellow rail in this geographic area. Using a multivariate approach that makes use of presence-only data through a maximum entropy framework we compared the distribution of where the focal species was observed to a reference set of the whole study area. Of the 784,657 ha over which our model was applied, only 1% (8643 ha) of this area was predicted suitable in its present condition, for supporting yellow rail in winter. Our analysis indicates that the yellow rail along the northern Gulf Coast of Alabama and Mississippi occupy a very narrow range of environmental conditions highlighting need for specific management actions to maintain and conserve suitable winter landscapes for this habitat-restricted species.

Editorial for Special Issue “Remote Sensing for Monitoring Wildlife and Habitat in a Changing World”

“…The works included in this Special Issue present some scientific and technological innovations in remote sensing for assessing the spatio-temporal dynamics of wildlife species and their habitats. Although constituting a very small set of studies, they cover a diverse array of geographic settings distributed throughout the world and comprising both terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16].…”

“…Although constituting a very small set of studies, they cover a diverse array of geographic settings distributed throughout the world and comprising both terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16]. These studies used diverse analytical Remote Sens.…”

“…terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16].…”

“…terrestrial [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and aquatic [9,12,15,16] systems (Figure 1). They also evaluate individual species groups, including corals [15], reptiles [6,9], birds [7,10], mammals [8,11,13,14], or a combination of different species groups [12,16]. These studies used diverse analytical approaches applied to remotely sensed data acquired by different sensor systems at different scales ranging from high spatial resolution sensors onboard unoccupied aircraft vehicles [16], underwater systems [15], and space-borne vehicles [12], to intermediate spatial resolution multispectral imagery acquired by operational satellite sensor systems such as the Landsat [6][7][8]10,11,14], SPOT [7], and MODIS [8,13] satellite series, together with coarser spatial resolution data acquired by weather satellite systems [9].…”

Spatiotemporal Variation of Siberian Crane Habitats and the Response to Water Level in Poyang Lake Wetland, China

“…Many previous studies have explored the ecological habits and habitat selection of migratory birds, such as suitable habitats [18][19][20], foraging behaviors [21][22][23][24], and overnight accommodation [25]. In terms of the environmental health assessment of migratory bird habitats, previous approaches have investigated spatiotemporal variations of habitats [26][27][28][29], amount characteristics and migration patterns [30,31], vegetation structure [32][33][34], biodiversity [35][36][37], etc.…”