Bioenergetics study completes three seasons of sampling; early data show key invertebrate biomass
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Summary
Researchers reported completion of three years of field sampling for a Great Salt Lake waterbird bioenergetics model, processing more than 1,100 of 1,400 cores and finding ostracods, daphnia and copepods are major contributors to biomass; work will feed a predictive model of food supply and bird demand.
Lauren, a Ph.D. candidate presenting the waterbird bioenergetics project, told attendees the team has finished three years of field sampling across 240 sites and is processing biomass samples to translate food availability into species-specific caloric supply.
"We have finished with our full 3 years of data collection for all of our systems," Lauren said, describing the project’s scope: submerged aquatic vegetation, macroinvertebrates and seed densities sampled across impounded and sheet-flow wetlands and processed into caloric metrics for waterfowl bioenergetics modeling.
She reported that the lab has processed about 1,140 of an expected 1,400 cores and that preliminary biomass distributions from August samples show a small number of taxa dominate total biomass. "These ostracods, daphnia, and copepods are kind of contributing a lot more to the biomass," she said, adding that some shell-bearing taxa still require shell-weight adjustments before final caloric calculations.
The project pairs these biomass estimates with bird demand (point counts and density metrics) to compute site-level "duck use days" and caloric supply under different water-level scenarios. Lauren said the team will incorporate depth, salinity gradients and hunting pressure into the final model and plans to produce spatial interpolations of biomass and resource distribution across managed and unmanaged areas.
Researchers emphasized processing capacity as a bottleneck: field samples are labor intensive and teams plan to hire additional technicians to complete sample processing. The work will be used to run scenario-based forecasts of how water-level changes could affect food availability for waterbirds and to inform wetland-management decisions.