FY17 Sea Duck Joint Venture Competitive Grants

The Sea Duck Joint Venture (SDJV) is a conservation partnership under the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. Its mission is to promote the conservation of all North American sea ducks through partnerships by providing greater knowledge and understanding for effective management. The SDJV has evolved from a broad-based science program to a more focused program intended to provide information most needed by managers to make informed decisions about sea duck management and conservation. The programs overall strategies and priorities are outlined in a strategic plan and an implementation plan and may be found at http://seaduckjv.org/. The SDJV is coordinated and administered by the USFWS. Funding is being made available to the SDJV through U.S. Congressional appropriations and some of this funding is used to address priority science needs of the SDJV. This funding opportunity is made under the authority of Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956; 16 U.S.C. 742. The SDJV will accept proposals for the following priority science needs in FY2017: 1. Science Need: Develop or refine techniques to estimate detection probabilities, misidentification rates, and count biases during aerial sea duck surveys. 2. Science need: Support for the Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey WBPHS review including analyzing data with respect to reallocation of survey effort 3. Science Need: Develop and/or evaluate methods for efficiently automating counts of birds in aerial photographs of large flocks, including birds with varying distribution and density patterns, and uniform vs dimorphic plumages. 4. Science Need: Determine population monitoring and information needs for management and conservation of sea ducks on the Great Lakes. 5. Science Need: Evaluate and modify veterinary and/or husbandry techniques to improve post-release survival of sea ducks, particularly surf scoter, white-winged scoter, and long-tailed duck, marked with implantable transmitters. 6. Science Need: Demonstrate the spatial resolution of stable isotope analysis of sea duck feather samples to determine breeding and molting areas in the absence of reference samples, particularly for scoters and long-tailed ducks. 7. Science Need: Determine if recruitment is a problem for the American Common Eider (ACOEI) and if so, identify the limitations. This broad topic includes elements that could affect fecundity (e.g. breeding propensity, clutch size, nest success, hatching success), duckling survival (direct: duckling predation; indirect: habitat, disease, etc.), etc. 8. Science Need: Determine whether sufficient population structure exists across the range of priority sea duck species to assess whether their populations should be managed as stocks or sub-populations, and ensure that research directed at reducing uncertainty in key demographic rates for population modeling efforts are applied at the appropriate geographic scales