Jeffrey R. Walters’s research while affiliated with Virginia Tech and other places

In cooperative breeding systems, inclusive fitness theory predicts that nonbreeding helpers more closely related to the breeders should be more willing to provide costly alloparental care and thus have more impact on breeder fitness. In the red-cockaded woodpecker (Dryobates borealis), most helpers are the breeders' earlier offspring, but helpers do vary within groups in both relatedness to the breeders (some even being unrelated) and sex, and it can be difficult to parse their separate impacts on breeder fitness. Moreover, most support for inclusive fitness theory has been positive associations between relatedness and behavior rather than actual fitness consequences. We used functional linear models to evaluate the per capita effects of helpers of different relatedness on eight breeder fitness components measured for up to 41 years at three sites. In support of inclusive fitness theory, helpers more related to the breeding pair made greater contributions to six fitness components. However, male helpers made equal contributions to increasing prefledging survival regardless of relatedness. These findings suggest that both inclusive fitness benefits and other direct benefits may underlie helping behaviors in the red-cockaded woodpecker. Our results also demonstrate the application of an underused statistical approach to disentangle a complex ecological phenomenon.

Jennie Duberstein In 2023, the American Ornithological Society (AOS) ­introduced a Conservation Practitioner Award, which recognizes individuals or groups of biologists at any stage of their career for outstanding work in government agencies (from municipal, state, provincial, federal, or international levels) or nongovernmental organizations to ­further the conservation of birds. This award acknowledges the ­planning, on-the-ground, or day-to-day work of ­dedicated professionals addressing avian conservation issues at a local or regional scale. Jennie Duberstein is the winner of the inaugural 2023 AOS Conservation Practitioner Award. Jennie Duberstein is the Coordinator of the Sonoran Joint Venture, one of 25 Migratory Bird Joint Ventures (JVs) across North America and one of just two that span the U.S. and Mexico. As the Sonoran JV coordinator, Dr. Duberstein is responsible for partnership-building for birds and habitat conservation across the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. She has directed environmental education programs, developed community-based conservation projects in the U.S.–Mexico border region, developed and taught courses and workshops on bird identification, ecotourism, and bird monitoring, and studied species including Double-crested Cormorant and wading birds in Sonora and Yellow-billed Cuckoos in Arizona. Dr. Duberstein is a ­conservation social scientist who has been a leader in advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion in bird conservation. She is also very engaged in education and outreach and has been a long-time camp leader for fledgling young birders, directing field courses, summer camps, and conferences, and generally helping to connect young birders with opportunities and each other.

Lisa Sorenson Stanley Senner The American Ornithological Society (AOS) Schreiber Award honors extraordinary conservation-related scientific contributions by an individual or small team. Contributions from throughout the world and over any time period are eligible for this award, including applied research, restoration, and educational actions that conserve birds or preserve significant bird habitats; scientific examination of the principles of avian conservation and application of new insights into species restoration; and scientific evaluation, guidance, creation, and oversight of avian recovery programs or habitat reserve and restoration programs. The award is named for Ralph Schreiber, a prominent figure in American ornithology known for his enthusiasm, energy, and dedication to research and conservation, particularly of seabirds. The AOS is awarding two Ralph W. Schreiber Awards in 2023, one to Lisa Sorenson and one to Stanley Senner. Lisa Sorenson is the executive director of BirdsCaribbean and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Boston University, Massachusetts. Dr. Sorenson has increased awareness, appreciation, and conservation of the Caribbean region’s unique avifauna through research, conservation, and public engagement programs for Caribbean island residents and beyond. Building from her PhD research on the behavioral ecology of White-cheeked Pintails in the Bahamas, Dr. Sorenson’s efforts over 35 years include capacity building; outreach and education; fostering an active network of Caribbean conservationists; and conveyance of conservation methods, community and youth education, and science to Caribbean audiences. Her leadership while vice president (VP) and president of the Society for Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds (now BirdsCaribbean) from 2005 to 2012, and more recently as its executive director (2012–present), has inspired, motivated, and energized island residents and others to contribute to island conservation efforts. Dr. Sorenson has tremendous skill in bringing people together from different island cultures, obtaining funding (>$3 million since 1997), and encouraging and mentoring many to become involved in bird conservation. Historically, much of the research on island birds was conducted by visitors from North America, often with little local involvement, thus limiting the opportunity for growth of indigenous conservation and capacity. Dr. Sorenson’s leadership has helped to overcome challenges in the region by addressing the need to train Caribbean nationals and empower local partners, teachers, and communities to carry out their own science, education, monitoring, and conservation. Since 1997, she has facilitated the delivery of more than 150 international and local training workshops, reaching more than 5,000 people. Dr. Sorenson has been a champion of increasing appreciation of the region’s endemic and migratory birds and the value of nature through the joy and fun of birding and bird education programs. This has, in turn, resulted in greater community engagement in actions to monitor, restore, and conserve threatened species and habitats, and it has yielded more young people pursuing careers in conservation. Dr. Sorenson has received 5 awards for her work in the region, including a Partners in Flight Leadership Award. She has also authored or coauthored numerous bird education resources, including school curricula and monitoring manuals for the region, as well as publications in peer-reviewed journals. The diverse Caribbean conservation initiatives, programs, and activities initiated, inspired, and facilitated by Dr. Sorenson’s leadership include the West Indian Whistling-Duck and Wetlands Conservation Project, BirdSleuth Caribbean, Caribbean Waterbird Census, Caribbean Birding Trail, Caribbean Endemic Bird Festival, Caribbean Seabird Conservation, and Caribbean Landbird Monitoring Network. Dr. Sorenson has been an AOS Elective Member since 1998 and an AOS Fellow since 2011. She helped organize the 2022 joint American Ornithological Society and BirdsCaribbean Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, serving on numerous committees.

Remote sensing data can be a powerful and cost-effective method for determining the extent, composition, and structure of ecosystems across large areas. To use this tool for effective conservation of individual species, we need to test the assumption that remotely sensed habitat indices correspond to both patch suitability (i.e., presence) and value (i.e., demographic rates) for the species reliant on those habitats. We built an open pine habitat quality index (HQI) from remotely sensed spectral data to identify the condition of pine stands. We correlated the HQI with presence, group size, and fledgling production of an avian species (red-cockaded woodpecker, Dryobates (=Picoides) borealis, RCW) associated with longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) using Bayesian logistic regressions and structural equation models. The HQI was correlated with RCW cavity tree and foraging area presence, with 10.8 and 16.0 increased odds of RCW presence with each unit increase in the HQI, respectively. However, the HQI was not correlated with RCW demographic performance. Given that RCWs are an umbrella species and are currently limited by habitat, that the HQI successfully identifies areas of higher quality habitat for RCW is useful for conservation planning. Improving the specificity of the remotely sensed index could improve the link between the HQI and RCW demographic performance, but might limit its application to RCW, instead of the entire open pine endemic community. Our study suggests that linking generalized habitat indices to species habitat suitability is possible and strengthens the justification for their use in cost-effective, large-scale conservation of imperiled ecosystems.

Animal abundance is determined by a number of factors, including vegetation structure, food availability and quality, human activities, predation risk, and disease. Vegetation structure, food availability, and human activity often are used to guide conservation efforts, such as protected area zoning and reforestation, especially for primates. We sought to determine whether Critically Endangered golden-crowned sifaka (Propithecus tattersalli) densities could be predicted across a heterogeneous landscape as a function of vegetation structure, food availability, and human activity. We conducted walking transect surveys across the sifakas’ entire global range in Loky-Manambato Protected Area of Madagascar from 2016–2018, expanding upon a study conducted in 2006/2008. Potential predictors of sifaka density included metrics of vegetation structure (e.g., tree density, forest type), food availability (e.g., food tree basal area, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)), and human activity (e.g., tree cutting, livestock grazing). Low-intensity tree cutting and wet season NDVI were the best, positive predictors of sifaka densities. Sifaka densities within study units across their restricted range (880 km²) were highly variable (range: 6.8–78.1 sifakas/km²), emphasizing the importance of large-scale study designs across all suitable land cover types for assessing a species’ abundance, regardless of its area of occupancy. We estimated that 10,222–12,631 sifakas remain. Based on previous surveys, this indicates that populations either remained stable over the past 20 years or have declined by 30–43% in the past 10 years; we argue that a decline is most likely based on our updating of forest cover estimates for both of the prior studies. We also found that wet season NDVI is a positive predictor of sifaka densities, which will aid managers in prioritizing conservation actions in this region using widely available remotely sensed data.

Animals that create structures often display non-random patterns in the direction of their constructions. This tendency of oriented construction is widely presumed to be an adaptive trait of the constructor’s extended phenotype, but there is little empirical support for this hypothesis. Particularly, for cavity nesting-birds there is a lack of studies examining this issue. In this study of a primary cavity excavator, the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker ( Dryobates borealis ), we show that cavity entrances exhibited a strong westward bias in all 11 of the populations examined throughout the geographic range of the species in the southeastern United States. This species requires cavities in living pine trees for roosting and nesting that often take many years to complete, resulting in many incomplete excavations on the landscape. We used population monitoring data to show that orientation was stronger among completed cavities than incomplete cavities. There was a significant correlation between latitude and average cavity direction among populations, turning northward with increasing latitude, suggesting adaptation to local conditions. Long-term monitoring data showed that cavity orientation and breeding group size are correlated with egg hatching rates, fledging rates, and the total number of fledglings produced per nest. Our results provide empirical evidence from extensive long-term data that directional orientation in animal constructions is an important feature of the extended animal phenotype and have immediate implications for animal ecology and the conservation of endangered species.

Research Highlight: Trzcinski, M., Cockle, K., Norris, A., Edworthy, A., Wiebe, K., & Martin, K. (2022). Woodpeckers maintain the diversity of cavity‐nesting vertebrates in a temperate forest. Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365‐2656.13626. Whether populations of hole‐nesting birds are limited by the availability of cavities is a long‐standing, fundamental question in avian community ecology. The structure of cavity‐nesting communities, known as nest webs, includes links between tree species that provide natural holes and bird species that nest in those holes (secondary cavity nesters, SCNs), tree species that provide substrates for cavity excavation and bird species such as woodpeckers that create cavities using those substrates (primary cavity nesters, PCNs), and between PCNs and SCNs. Trzcinski et al. (2022) focus on the latter links and provide the most compelling empirical evidence to date that cavities created by PCNs specifically, as opposed to natural holes or holes generally, limit populations of SCNs. Using data from a long‐term study, the authors employ three analyses to separate effects of availability of cavities from environmental factors such as food, habitat features and host tree abundance, while controlling for annual variation and autocorrelation within sites, to isolate the relationship between excavated cavities and SCN numbers. They show that nest density of SCNs is positively related to PCN nest density the previous year, an indicator of availability of excavated cavities, and that the effect of PCNs is stronger when other variables are accounted for. North American coniferous forests such as that studied by Trzcinski et al. (2022) are exceptional in that excavated cavities comprise the vast majority of nesting holes. Whether their findings apply to other systems in which PCNs are a major source of cavities, or to particular PCN–SCN relationships in systems in which excavated cavities account for a much lower proportion of nesting holes remains to be investigated.

Most studies of the ecological effects of climate change consider only a limited number of weather drivers that could affect populations, though we know that multiple weather drivers can simultaneously affect population growth rate. Multiple drivers could simultaneously increase/decrease one vital rate, or one may increase a vital rate while another decreases the same vital rate. Considering the impact of multiple weather drivers on vital rates is particularly important in a changing climate, in which correlations among drivers may not be preserved in the future. We used a long‐term dataset on the endangered red‐cockaded woodpecker (Dryobates borealis) to understand how multiple weather drivers jointly affect survival and reproductive vital rates and then assessed the contributions of individual weather drivers to historical trends in vital rates over time. We found that vital rates were often influenced by more than one weather driver and that weather drivers most commonly exerted opposing effects. For instance, some weather drivers increased vital rates over time, while others acted in the opposite direction, decreasing vital rates over time. Importantly, the historical correlations among weather drivers are almost always projected to change in the future climate, such that future trends in vital rates may not match historical trends. For example, we do not find historical trends in adult survival, but changing correlations among weather drivers could generate future trends in this vital rate. Our work provides an example of how multiple weather drivers can control a variety of vital rates and also illustrates how changes in the correlation structure of weather drivers through time might substantially affect future trends in individual and population performance.