BirdReturns

BirdReturns pairs birding and farmland management with innovations in big data, crowd-sourcing and online auctioneering.
 
Geese, ducks, cranes, and shorebirds need re-fueling stations along their seasonal migration routes. They stop to rest and forage ahead of the next leg of their journey. When wetlands disappear – as 90 percent of them have in the U.S. – critical links in a hemispheric chain of habitat “stepping stones” weaken. And as a consequence, one of the greatest biological phenomena on Earth – the bird migration along the Pacific Flyway – becomes increasingly imperiled.

Figuring out whether renting could work first required us to figure out when the birds would need habitat. To answer this, our scientists partnered with researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which had developed a mobile app – eBird – that birders use to record their observations. We worked with collaborators to analyze the millions of datapoints streaming in from these citizen scientists, to figure out the specific weeks birds in the Valley might most need habitat. Then, working with Point Blue Conservation Science, we mapped surface water availability using NASA satellite imagery to estimate the wetland habitat gap we needed to fill.  

We also needed to figure out who would be willing to rent their farms for this purpose. We turned to rice farmers, as they typically flood their fields in winter to decompose stubble from the previous year’s harvest. That practice has long been recognized as bird friendly. Perhaps we could develop an incentive for those farmers to make it even friendlier – by encouraging farmers to delay draining their fields so as to give the birds the extra time they might need during that key period of the migration?

Our conservation scientists and economists mapped the annual migration cycle onto the agricultural cycle to figure out how we might be able to better synchronize them. We then launched an online “reverse auction” where farmers could compete for funds in exchange for keeping their land flooded for the period we determined to be most important. We could specify the weeks we sought flooded habitat, and even the depth of the resulting water (because some species may need just a few inches, others a foot or more). We evaluated bids based not just on the proposed price of renting the acreage, but also on the conservation value of the potential habitat a given farm might produce, based on proximity to wildlife refuges and so on.