Shorebird conservation in Venezuela: status, threats and priorities

With 150,064 km2 of wetlands (16% of national territory) located across major migration routes on the southern edge of the Caribbean Sea and northern edge of South America, Venezuela provides significant habitat for migratory shorebirds. Through a combination of published and grey literature reviews, expert consultations and fieldwork, we compile the scant information available on the distribution and abundance of shorebirds in Venezuela to determine priority areas for conservation, and to identify sites that potentially meet the criteria for nomination as Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network sites. We focus on species of global conservation priority, clarifying species and site status and identifying the main threats. We identify 11 priority species based on abundance and frequency of records, both resident breeders and migrants. Nine of these species showed maximum abundances exceeding the 1% threshold (range 1.1–19.5%) of the biogeographic population in at least one stopover site. Twenty-seven priority sites for shorebird conservation were identified in four main regions: Western Caribbean Coast, Eastern Caribbean Coast, Caribbean Islands and Los Llanos. These comprise wintering areas, and stopover sites used during migration, both southbound in autumn and northbound in spring. They range in size from 52 to 80,000 ha, although this includes areas that are not shorebird habitat. We recognise ten types of threats, four of which affect more than half of the sites: (1) use of biological resources; (2) residential and commercial development; (3) human encroachment and disturbance and (4) pollution (mainly from oil spills). We acknowledge that the region south of the Orinoco River, almost half of Venezuela’s land surface, lacks sufficient occurrence data for shorebirds to identify priority sites objectively. We conclude that developing a National Shorebird Conservation Plan is vital for the conservation of shorebirds in Venezuela. This will require the involvement of central and local government agencies, local communities, research institutes and universities, to develop joint actions aimed at understanding and raising awareness of the problems of shorebird populations and their habitats, to support future shorebird conservation programmes.