Nature Today | New brochure ‘Coastal breeding birds in the Netherlands

In natural situations, coastal breeding birds breed on islands, beaches, beach plains and salt marshes and tidal marshes. These are all places that have little or no vegetation. Over the past century, many natural breeding areas for coastal breeding birds have disappeared or become unsuitable. The construction of the Delta Works and the closure of the Zuiderzee and Lauwerszee have had a large-scale effect on the dynamics in the estuaries (mouth of a river with brackish water and tides, ed.). To maintain and strengthen populations of coastal breeding birds, new breeding areas have been created and existing areas redeveloped for many decades.

Last year, OBN Natuurkennis published a research report (pdf: 1.8 MB) that provides an overview of successful measures in the construction, (re)development or management of breeding areas for coastal breeding birds, in particular for the arctic tern, common tern, sandwich tern , little tern, avocet, sand plover and ringed plover.

Brochure

A brochure of this report has now been published (PDF: 8.3 MB) in which the results from the research are clearly summarized. The richly illustrated brochure provides an overview of the most effective and sustainable measures for coastal breeding birds. This concerns both design and management measures and is mainly intended to support site managers and policy makers in making choices when constructing new areas or optimizing existing areas. The core of this brochure is about managing and designing complete areas and uses the similarities between coastal breeding bird species. The basic idea is that measures in areas preferably contribute to several coastal breeding bird species. You can read much more about this in the research report.

More information

• Would you like to know more about this subject and take a look into the field together with the researchers and administrators? Then visit one of the two field workshops on April 9 in Groningen or on May 14 in Zeeland. Register via www.veldwerkplaats.nl.

Text: OBN Nature Knowledge
Image: Mark Collier, Waardenburg Ecology; OBN Nature Knowledge