Virginia Tech Shorebird Program work at Fire Island National Seashore post Hurricane Sandy

Virginia Tech Shorebird Program

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the Atlantic Coast, affecting most of the United States coastline and quickly becoming one of the most costly hurricanes on record. Hurricane Sandy eroded dunes, caused several overwashes, and breached Fire Island and Westhampton Island in three locations. Two breaches were subsequently filled by the US Army Corps of Engineers and one was left to undergo natural erosion and accretion processes. In response to Hurricane Sandy, we began monitoring the piping plovers on Fire Island (including Fire Island National Seashore) and the west end of Westhampton Island in 2013 to understand the population response to new habitat created by Hurricane Sandy. Following Hurricane Sandy, the islands were also stabilized in most areas with artificial dunes, American beachgrass plantings, and beach nourishment, which led to the creation of two restoration areas to mitigate for the potential loss of plover habitat to stabilization efforts. The temporal overlap and proximity of the hurricane- and human-manipulated habitat has led to an ideal semi-natural experiment for understanding the potential effects of many different habitat configurations to piping plovers on all of the constituent elements of population change: birth, death, immigration, and emigration. Since the beginning of the project, we have been evaluating plover demography, food availability, and habitat selection across the study area to inform future plover habitat creation, management, and restoration. We are also broadly seek to understand how Fire Island fits into the regional breeding population (Weithman et al. 2019) and predator responses to plover management (Black et al. 2023).

Virginia Tech Shorebird Program work at Fire Island National Seashore post Hurricane Sandy

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