Aims and objectives

The dramatic and quite exceptional shifts in breeding habitat of this long-distance migrant, the obvious flexibility of the species to react to environmental changes affecting their coastal habitat and the threatening future changes induced by global change in coastal ecosystems along the flyway from temperate coasts to the high Arctic form the major motivation of this project.

The guiding hypothesis is that the observed and ongoing range expansion of barnacle geese from arctic to temperate environments has been possible due to changes in the availability of suitable forage and environmental changes in former staging habitats that now allow breeding.

An approach on two levels:

• the level of nutritional ecology, unraveling the interaction between daylength period (feeding opportunity hours) and protein content of the forage, thereby analysing the consequences of different gosling growth conditions and spring staging conditions on life history parameters of individuals (individual approach in co-operation with IfV Wilhelmshaven)

• the landscape level, exploring and modelling the consequences of global change (changes in land use and climate change) on habitat availability and foraging conditions for the flyway population of barnacle geese (in co-operation with the Landscape Ecology Group Oldenburg).