Lesser Yellowlegs location data describing the occurrence of birds within harvest zones in the Caribbean and South America ...

• Main Authors: McDuffie, Laura A., Christie, Katherine S., Harrison, Autumn-Lynn, Taylor, Audrey R., Andres, Brad A., Laliberte, Benoit, Johnson, James A.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: FOS Biological sciences; Tringa flavipes; Random walk model; harvest; migratory shorebirds; Lesser Yellowlegs; binomial generalized linear model; continuous-time functional movement models; Anchorage; Canada; Archipelago; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m97h; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.s4mw6m97h

Shorebirds have experienced a precipitous reduction in abundance over the past four decades. While some threats to shorebirds are widespread (e.g. habitat alteration), others are regional and may affect specific populations. Lesser Yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes) are long-distance migrants that breed across the North American boreal biome and have declined in abundance by 60-80% since the 1970s. The documented harvest of Lesser Yellowlegs in the Caribbean and northeastern South America during southward migration is a possible limiting factor for the species, but it is unknown to what extent birds from different breeding origins may be affected. To address the question of differential occurrence in harvest zones during southward migration, we used PinPoint GPS Argos transmitters to track the southward migrations of 85 adult Lesser Yellowlegs from across the species’ breeding range and 80° of longitude from Anchorage, Alaska, USA to the Mingan Archipelago, Quebec, Canada. We classified migratory locations as ... : Location data was collected using Lotek Argos PinPoint-75 transmitters attached to Lesser Yellowlegs using a leg-loop harness method. Lesser Yellowlegs were tracked from six geographically disparate populations. The PinPoint-75 model receives and transmits location data remotely through the Argos system, which allows data to be dowloaded without the need to recapture the bird. All data was accessed in ArgosWeb (https://argos-system.clsamerica.com/argos-cwi2/login.html) and processed through a proprietary sofware called Lotek Argos-GPS Data Processor V4.2. This processor outputs human-readable .csv files which include the latitude and longitude of locations in decimal degrees. To run the analyses outlined in the manuscript (probability of occurence in harvest zones and predictors of occurence in harvest zones) we truncated the data to only include locations from July 1 through October 21 of each year. We restricted our analysis to southward migration, ending on October 21 for three reasons. First, harvest ...