WEBVTT FILE

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So in the Central Valley, we once had a vast system

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of about four million acres of wetlands and wetland-like features,

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this integrated mosaic of wet stuff. And since that time,

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we've lost about 95% of those habitats.

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[chime]
California's Central Valley is home to one of the largest agro-ecosystems

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on the planet. Since the loss of the wetlands, migratory birds

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are now very dependant on what's happening on that agricultural land

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to find places to forage and to spend the winter.

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So our work with farmers is really an integral part of the flyway.

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Waterbirds need water to give them access to a lot

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of the food resources. Shorebirds in particular eat a lot of the

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aquatic invertebrates that grow in the water. And so, by knowing where the water

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is, we can really maximize the value of the

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restoration and conservation we do for waterbirds in the Central Valley.

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The NASA and USGS data that are available allow us to make

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the distribution maps on the probability that water might be in any given pixel –

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so that's a 30-meter by 30-meter cell anywhere within the Central Valley of California.

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The real value of the satellite, and Landsat archive,

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is that we are able to look at the water distribution at a very fine spatial scale

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so that's a 30- by 30-meter pixel, which is really relevant in terms of

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understanding habitat for migratory water birds. We're also able then to look at that

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across a very large spatial extent of the entire Central Valley.

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Point Blue Conservation Science has been one of our

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trusted conservation partners at the Nature Conservancy for many many years

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and so I reached out to our partners at Point Blue and we started working

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together on these Landsat data to try and perfect ways that

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we could use to predict water availability in the Central Valley.

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So simultaneously, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

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was really making great strides in using citizen science data

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to predict when and where birds would occur.

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I'm Steve Kelling, I'm the Director of Information sciences

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at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

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I run a project called eBird.

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eBird is a citizen scientist project that engages the public

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to submit checklists of their bird observations

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to a central database.

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Currently we collect about a 100 million observations per year.

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What makes eBird unique, though,

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is that because we collect data year round, we can essentially

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describe the entire life history of a bird or a population

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of birds as the move throughout the landscape.

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So when we think of how a bird moves across a hemisphere,

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we can use MODIS landcover information to allow us

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to make these habitat relationships

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with particular species of birds.

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And with that kind of relationship we can then make predictions

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in areas where we don't have information about birds

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but we do have information about the habitats that they're in.

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What we're able to show

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was that there was a high correlation between

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abundance of shorebirds

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with rice farming

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and then go out to the rice fields and feed during the day

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and then go to the refuges at night to roost.

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And the a-ha moment really came with putting

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these two datasets together and realizing that there were some horrible mis-matches.

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So we had models predicting high abundances of birds

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at times when there was not very much water.

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And that made us realize there was something we could do out there to make that place better

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for birds at that time.

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Our program Bird Returns allows us to work directly with farmers to help them help us create bird habitat.

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Rice farmers typically flood their fields

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to grow the crop, so we knew there was water available

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just not at the right times and places to help the birds. So by working with

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rice farmers we were able to essentially rent their fields

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for a couple weeks a year, and instead of growing rice, create the conditions

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which would grow birds or create habitat for wintering birds.

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Look, these birds are migratory superheroes.

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They mystify us. The shorebirds we work with are breeding in Alaska

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and wintering as far south as southern Peru.

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We're talking up to 20,000 kilometers each year, some of these small birds

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are flying. So it behooves us to

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help them on their journey, provide this food resource for them

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but to do it in a responsible way that again shows our respect

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for the limited resource that water is, today, in the Western United States.

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Bird Returns is having a lot of impact,

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both for wetland conditions and for farmers, but also for the birds.

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And we're monitoring birds on all of the fields that we flood

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out there and we're comparing those with bird observations on fields that aren't flooded.

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So we're finding densities that are 30 times

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greater on our fields than on the comparison control fields.

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The ability of them to use refuge lands and

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a compatible agricultural landscape allows us to manage

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the whole valley as an integrated matrix.

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This is really the power of using these kinds of data to make conservation decisions.

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Not only for the Nature Conservancy but also for

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public lands and private land managers.

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