| | Accession Number | 5004714 |
| | Title | Food production and avian use of moist-soil impoundments in the Mississippi Alluvial |
| | Valley |
| | Project Description | Moist-soil management is a wetland management technique that uses manipulation of water |
| | levels and periodic vegetation disturbance to provide food and other habitat resources for birds in |
| | seasonally flooded herbaceous wetlands. Moist-soil management is an important alternative to |
| | crop production as a means of providing foraging habitat for waterfowl. More than 300 |
| | impoundments currently are managed to provide 20-25,000 acres of moist-soil habitat on state |
| | and federal wildlife areas in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, and the success of public lands in |
| | meeting waterfowl habitat objectives of the Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture depends |
| | critically on effective management of these sites. Unique among moist-soil impoundments are |
| | 50-100 former catfish production ponds that are especially suited to wetland management |
| | because each 10- to 20-acre unit can be drained and flooded independently. These impoundments |
| | also are suited to development and evaluation of management practices because individual units |
| | are relatively uniform, the number of ponds is adequate to allow replication of management |
| | treatments, and evaluation can occur at the same scale that management practices are applied. |
| | Biological planning models used by the Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture to determine |
| | regional waterfowl and shorebird habitat objectives are driven by estimates of food requirements |
| | and availability. These energetic models are based on limited data and assume that moist-soil |
| | habitats produce an average of 400 lbs/ac of seeds for wintering waterfowl and 2 g/square-meter of |
| | aquatic invertebrates for migrating shorebirds. Objectives of this study will be to: (1) evaluate |
| | double sampling for stratification as a strategy for estimating food production in moist-soil |
| | impoundments; (2) estimate availability of moist-soil seeds to wintering ducks and invertebrates to |
| | migrating shorebirds in catfish ponds managed as moist-soil impoundments; and (3) determine if |
| | use by wintering ducks and migrating shorebirds is proportional to food availability and consistent |
| | with use-days expected in biological planning models. |
| | Keywords | food availability, food resources, moist-soil management, sampling, shorebirds, |
| | Principal | Kenneth J Reinecke, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center: ken_reinecke@usgs.gov; Jack W |
| | Investigators | Grubaugh, University of Memphis: grubaugh@memphis.edu; Kevin M Hartke, USGS Patuxent |
| | Wildlife Research Center: kmhartke@usgs.gov; |
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