ABC and the Army Corps of Engineers

Black Skimmer. Photo: USFWS

The US Army Corps of Engineers is the federal agency charged with shoreline protection and maintaining America’s navigable waterways for commerce and national defense. Both of these activities exert considerable influence on coastal bird habitats. Since 2004, American Bird Conservancy has been working with the Corps’ Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Environmental Lab, to minimize negative impacts of these activities and increase opportunities for habitat restoration.

ABC organized and facilitated three regional workshops (covering the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Gulf of Mexico Coasts) to bring together biologists, engineers, and coastal geomorphologists to understand the effects of coastal Corps activities on birds and find new opportunities for conservation partnerships (PowerPoint presentations and Proceedings documents for these workshops are available online. These workshops highlighted the importance of coastal inlets for many species of shorebirds and seabirds, suggested opportunities to use dredged material to create tern and skimmer nesting habitat, and focused on the importance of Barrier Island and Estuarine ecosystems as non-breeding habitat for Piping Plovers, Snowy Plovers, and Red Knots. The South Atlantic meeting also included a symposium on the Wintering Ecology and Conservation of Piping Plovers.

ABC and the ERDC Environmental Lab have developed a Coastal Engineering and Bird Conservation Literature Gateway, providing a multiple keyword search engine to facilitate access to many excellent technical reports on these topics that do not have widespread circulation. ABC has also partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to create a Geographic Information System (GIS) displaying the distribution of coastal birds relative to the distribution of coastal engineering projects in the state of Florida. This GIS has provided the foundation for discussions for minimizing potential negative impacts of coastal engineering on Piping Plovers and Snowy Plovers in a Florida-wide consultation on sand placement projects between the USFWS and the Corps.