| | Accession Number | 5004023 |
| | Title | Evaluating rice fields as foraging habitat for waterfowl to improve delivery of the |
| | Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture |
| | Project Description | The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture has developed habitat |
| | objectives for regional migratory bird conservation in the Mississippi Alluvial Valley based on |
| | biological criteria. Management plans are integrated in the sense that habitat objectives for |
| | waterfowl and other migratory birds, and for public and private lands, are interdependent. For |
| | example, if most of the foraging habitat for priority waterfowl species can be provided on private |
| | agricultural lands, managers of public wildlife areas can decrease resources allocated to food |
| | production for waterfowl and increase efforts to restore natural wetlands for a diverse array of |
| | migratory birds. Thus, a key element of the current approach to formulating habitat objectives for |
| | waterfowl is the capability of private agricultural lands, especially harvested rice fields, to provide |
| | food for ducks. Data currently used by the Joint Venture to assess the capability of rice fields to |
| | feed ducks were collected in Arkansas during 1983-84 and 1984-85. More recent data from |
| | Mississippi suggest that little of the grain lost during rice harvest remains in early winter when |
| | waterfowl arrive, perhaps because harvest now occurs earlier in autumn and rice seeds sprout in |
| | the interval between harvest and early winter. Research is needed to estimate current densities of |
| | rice seed available to waterfowl, identify rates and pathways of seed loss between harvest and |
| | waterfowl arrival, and quantify the extent to which available rice seed is depleted and therefore |
| | may represent a limiting resource for waterfowl. The survey sampling strategy and related |
| | experiments designed to answer these questions will be implemented on a landscape scale so |
| | that results can be used by the Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture in their adaptive or iterative |
| | process of refining habitat objectives. |
| | Keywords | food resources, habitat inventory, limiting factors, lmv joint venture, nawmp, private lands, rice, |
| | waterfowl management, |
| | Principal | Kenneth J Reinecke, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center: ken_reinecke@usgs.gov; Richard |
| | Investigators | M Kaminski, Mississippi State University: rkaminski@cfr.msstate.edu; Mark J Petrie, Ducks |
| | Unlimited, Pacific Northwest Office: mpetrie@ducks.org; Bruce D Dugger, Southern Illinois |
| | University: bdugger@siu.edu; William B Uihlein, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Lower Mississippi |
| | Valley Joint Venture: bill_uihlein@fws.gov; |
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