On a Florida bombing range, endangered woodpeckers get a second chance

Florida’s Avon Park bombing range is teeming with life. Over 40 at-risk species occupy this 106,000-acre expanse used by the U.S. Air Force for training exercises. 

Conservation biologists from Michigan State University are using the range to test something other than weapons: innovative strategies to save threatened species. 

Using decades’ worth of monitoring data, researchers are looking back through time to understand the outcome of interventions designed to rescue a population of imperiled red-cockaded woodpeckers. 

What they’ve found is a promising story of success.  

Their results, published in a special edition of (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [DOI Link]), demonstrate the potential for translocations — the practice of moving individuals from donor populations to isolated, at-risk ones — to reverse long-term population decline in endangered species. It’s the latest study from MSU’s Fitzpatrick Lab to analyze how translocation efforts can help restore connectivity between isolated populations and bring dwindling species back from the brink. 

These findings emphasize how effective the careful introduction of new individuals can be in the short-term and in the years and decades ahead — presenting a potential boon for threatened and endangered species. 

When used in concert with land protection and management strategies such as controlled burns, interventions at the individual level can help dwindling communities recover. 

Red-cockaded woodpeckers, once abundant from the American South to the Eastern seaboard, have disappeared alongside their pine savannah habitat, now confined to small, disconnected pockets covering only three percent of their historic range. 

The overdevelopment of these ecosystems has placed hundreds of species — including the red-cockaded woodpecker — at risk of disappearing entirely.  

“The only reason that these populations are still around is because of the continued collaborations and long-term investment in these imperiled species,” explained Alex Lewanski, a graduate student at MSU and first author on the study. 

The Avon Park Air Force Range contains over 35,000 acres of pine savannah, providing a well-protected band of habitat for threatened animals and a proving ground for complex conservation strategies. 

The installation is one of 18 Sentinel Landscapes; protected areas around military installations where the Department of Defense and other federal agencies work with state governments and private stakeholders to meet conservation goals. 

Leveraging this rare opportunity, researchers from Archbold Biological Station, in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Air Force, introduced fifty-four red cockaded woodpeckers from six donor populations into the range’s pine savannahs between 1998 and 2016. Analyses revealed that translocations provided substantial and extended benefits, improving the population’s size and overall genetic health. 

MSU researchers determined that the introduced birds contributed directly to higher population counts, and that translocated birds and their descendants tended to have higher rates of survival and reproductive success. 

The findings indicate that reproductive success is highly associated with total nesting years — and translocated birds tended to nest for more years than locally hatched ones.  

These positive effects persisted into the future along family lines. About 70 percent of the translocated woodpeckers survived in the population after their release, and many formed breeding pairs with local individuals, providing a boost to the genetic diversity of the population. 

But complex population dynamics, changes which manifest across decades, and the sheer challenge of gathering high-resolution monitoring data makes gauging the effectiveness of translocation efforts difficult. The detail and length of this study, the authors explain, provide rare insights into the long-term effects of these strategies. 

The team hopes that these positive results incentivize land managers to consider the long-term benefits of translocations and continued monitoring.  

“It has the potential to act as an important component of managing many imperiled species,” Lewanski said.  

While the woodpeckers are benefitting from this extensive conservation project, these strategies, and the partnership which support them, have implications for other at-risk species, too. 

In the future, Lewanski expects that genetic insights will play a growing role in tracking and evaluating conservation programs. Analysis of genetic material helps detect and minimize inbreeding and create highly detailed pedigrees for populations, reducing the burden of on-site monitoring programs to track bird nesting and reproduction. 

Using genetic monitoring tools allows scientists and land managers to be more precise when deciding how and when to use translocations, according to Sarah Fitzpatrick, a professor at Michigan State University and  senior author on the study. 

Eventually, a combination of genomic analysis and on-site monitoring could provide tailor-made strategies for managers attempting translocations. 

This study is the product of a partnership between Michigan State University, Archbold Biological Research Station, the U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Funding for managing and monitoring the Avon Park red-cockaded woodpeckers was provided by the DoD, the USAF, and the USFWS. Additional project support was provided by the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship from the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. 

By Caleb Hess