• Faculty Research Interests
• Scholarly Contributions
• Undergraduate Research
• Marine Science Seminar

  • Bird Friendly Beaches: Managing for Migrating and Wintering Shorebirds.
  • Funding Actionable Coastal Resource Management Research
  • Alternative Microbiomes are Not Fake News! One for Public Health and One for Our Climate
  • Measuring Mucus for Biomarkers of Farmed Salmon Reproductive Fitness
  • Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances are Everywhere! What are They, and What Do We Do Now?
  • Disentangling Trophic Interactions on Nearshore Reefs and Implications for Ecological Resilience
  • Impacts of Coastal Development on Groundwater Composition in Tidal Creek Basins
  • They Grow Up So Slowly: Studying Sea Turtles in the Southeast U.S.
  • Social Carrying Capacity of Mariculture in South Carolina
  • Archives of Fort Johnson Seminars

Melissa Chaplin, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

10 January 2020

Many species of shorebirds require healthy beach habitats with low disturbance to support all or part of their life cycle.  Most of these species are in decline and some, such as the piping plover (Charadrius melodus) and red knot (Calidris canutus rufa), are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.  Shorebirds require certain physical and biological features associated with beach habitats that need to be taken into consideration throughout the entire year encompassing migratory and winter seasons in addition to the breeding season.  These considerations need to be integrated into local beach management.  Two management practices that can go a long way to minimize disturbance on developed beaches are not allowing dogs in important shorebird areas and posting roosting areas during the nonbreeding season.  Several islands in South Carolina have incorporated these practices into their local beach management.  The evolution of these beach management practices has taken a combination of regulatory requirements, long term partnerships, monitoring, data sharing, and time.  Shorebird survival impacts associated with disturbance (Gibson et al. 2018) and year round recreational use of local beaches in South Carolina warrant year round beach management, not just breeding season management.  Lessons learned and the evolution of these beach management practices in support of shorebird conservation will be discussed.