vegetation appears red or brown, and bare land appears yellow or green .Waterfowl and Shorebird Habitat on Agricultural Lands The western U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast provides important habitat for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds.
According to a news release Thursday from the DWR, the 10 HPAI positive birds have been located in Cache, Weber, Salt Lake, Utah, Tooele and Carbon counties. The birds include Canada geese, turkey vultures, great horned owls, hawks, pelicans and ducks.
Assessments have been conducted for 2005 to the present, and are used to help determine if regional habitat objectives are being met, while also providing insights into inter-annual and intra-annual variation in habitat. In addition, these data are used to assist with planning and assessment of conservation delivery practices.
For example, the GCJV uses waterfowl habitat assessments to measure the contribution of the Texas Prairie Wetlands Project, a partnership that works with private landowners to restore, enhance, and create shallow-water wetlands, to the overall regional waterfowl habitat abundance.
The birds were sent to Logan’s Utah Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory for testing, and then to the National Veterinary Services laboratory in Ames, Iowa.
“The Department of Environmental Quality confirmed the drinking water from Scofield Reservoir would not be impacted by avian flu, since the water is treated,” the DWR said in the release. “Normal recreational activities, such as fishing and swimming should also not be impacted.” https://www.redbulltheater.com/profile/top-gun-maverick-2022-google-drive-mp4-hd-720p/profile
According to the release, the virus is typically spread through discharge from a bird’s mouth or nostrils and fecal droppings. Waterfowl and shorebirds can carry the virus relatively asymptomatically, though they too can be killed by it. Scavengers and raptors are more severely and rapidly impacted by the virus.
While HPAI occasionally kills wild birds, it can cause high mortality rates in domestic chickens, turkeys and ducks.
The DWR indicates songbirds are not typically affected, and humans, too, are at low risk of being harmed by the virus. While bird feeders do not have to be removed, regular cleaning of feeders and baths is good practice.
The western U.S. Gulf of Mexico coast provides important habitat for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds. The Gulf Coast Joint Venture (GCJV) uses bioenergetic models (i.e., models that incorporate species-specific population objectives, temporal residency, energy demand of birds, and foraging values of habitats) to translate fall–winter waterfowl population targets and summer–fall shorebird population targets into habitat objectives for this important region.
These objectives are expected to represent landscape conditions needed to support desired population levels. GCJV scientists, in collaboration with geographers at the USGS Wetland and Aquatic Research Center, use remote sensing to conduct annual periodic assessments of waterfowl and shorebird habitat on flooded agricultural lands and moist-soil impoundments within the GCJV region.
The assessments are conducted several times per year during important migration periods for each of these two bird guilds. Spectral indices derived from Landsat imagery, including the land-surface water index, the modified normalized water index, the enhanced normalized difference vegetation index, and the normalized difference built-up index, are used to classify bird habitats.
