José Alves, a visiting researcher at UW, has recently been awarded a grant from RANNIS to investigate responses of migratory shorebirds to environmental change. These species link distant locations during their annual cycle, for example whimbrel that breed in Iceland spend the winter in West Africa and sanderling from Greenland can travel all the way to Namibia. This group of birds is therefore at the forefront of environmental change, be it the relatively faster warming that is occurring in their breeding areas at high latitudes, or the habitat changes to their costal wintering sites often occurring through costal development. In this project, information from multiple sources will be congregated to identify species and populations that may be under higher levels of pressure and actions towards their conservation can be recommended.