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Navigating time and space: The evolutionary movement ecology of a polygamous partial migrant

Subject Area Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Evolution, Anthropology
Term from 2018 to 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 415037502
 
Final Report Year 2023

Final Report Abstract

My project focused on studying the movement ecology of the snowy plover, with the goal of interpreting within- and among-individual variation in light of the socio-ecological environment. The snowy plover is a shorebird with a high level of plasticity in its polyandrous breeding behavior. I aimed to study variation in movement at two hierarchical levels: the population and the individual. To achieve this, I planned to quantify metapopulation dynamics of the snowy plover using long-term monitoring data and assess individual variation in movement behavior using GPS tag deployments. Unfortunately, complications caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic and changes in data availability beyond my control severely compromised my data sources. To make the most of a tough situation, I initiated the publication of an open-access database of all long-term monitoring data collected by my host, Dr. Clemens Küpper, and I in Mexico since 2006. The database, known as ‘CeutaOPEN’, is accompanied by a peerreviewed article and RMarkdown documentation which encourages transparency and reproducibility for statistical workflows in evolutionary ecology and conservation biology. Throughout the project I led several workshops and M.Sc. theses that took advantage of ‘CeutaOPEN’. In addition to this, I was able to make significant progress in several promising directions pertinent to the project’s original aims. Through an experiment on free-living snowy plovers, I was able to confirm that the tagging method I developed did not have a negative impact on self-maintenance, reproductive success, or return rate of tagged birds, ensuring the safety and reliability of my field methodologies. Using this tagging method I gathered spatiotemporal information on snowy plover movements during breeding season with the aim to understand their polyandrous breeding system, and answer questions about desertion patterns and associations with previous mates and offspring. Although most tags could not be recovered due to travel-restrictions caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic, anecdotal insights from a few retrieved tags revealed a remarkable story of a breeding pair successfully initiating several sequentially polyandrous nests. Using the long-term database, CeutaOPEN, I was also able to quantify that experienced females initiated nests earlier, leading to improved reproductive potential through sequentially polyandrous matings. This result provides important context for interpreting individual variation in breeding schedules and migratory behavior. In lieu of the travel-restrictions I experienced during the project, I switched to studying several European plover species and initiated a cross-population study that provided important insights for the understudied field of spatio-temporal sex role variation. Throughout the course of the project I established several collaborations that have and will continue to result in new opportunities for productive co-authorships beyond the funding period of the project. I also led a successful social media campaign that promoted my project.

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