Integrating dynamic processes into waterfowl conservation prioritization tools

Aim: Traditional approaches for including species’ distributions in conservation planning have presented them as long-term averages of variation. Like these approaches, the main waterfowl conservation targeting tool in the United States Prairie Pothole Region (US PPR) is based primarily on long-term averaged distributions of breeding pairs. While this tool has supported valuable conservation, it does not explicitly consider spatiotemporal changes in spring wetland availability and does not assess wetland availability during the brood rearing period. We sought to develop a modeling approach and targeting tool that incorporated these types of dynamics for breeding waterfowl pairs and broods. This goal also presented an opportunity for us to compare predictions from a traditional targeting tool based on long-term averages to predictions from spatiotemporal models. Such a comparison facilitated tests of the underlying assumption that this traditional targeting tool could provide an effecti...