Sustainable management of migratory European ducks: finding model species

Eurasian migratory ducks are a natural resource shared between multiple European countries. Due to lack of flyway-level management and monitoring, there is a risk of “the tragedy of the commons” arising, where populations are overexploited. Effective management may also be hindered by a poor understanding of the factors that limit and regulate migratory populations throughout their flyways, and over time. Following decades of population increase, some European duck populations now show signs of levelling off or even decline, underlining the need for more active management. In Europe, we lack effective common tools to manage duck populations, despite the need and enthusiasm for establishing flyway-level adaptive management (AM) schemes for migratory birds. There are several international legal agreements (e.g. EEC Birds Directive, AEWA) that oblige European countries to sustainably manage migratory birds and their habitats. Although the lack of coordinated demographic and hunting data remains a challenge to sustainable management planning for waterfowl, AM provides a robust decision-making framework even in the presence of uncertainty.

We investigate the research and monitoring needs in Europe to successfully apply AM to ducks, and search for possible model species, focusing on freshwater duck species.  Our geographical focus is NW Europe (excluding Russia), the area utilized by ducks in the East-Atlantic flyway. Based on current knowledge and their wide distribution, we suggest that Common Teal Anas crecca, Eurasian Wigeon Mareca penelopeand Common Goldeneye Bucephala clangulawould be the best species for testing the application of an AM modelling approach for ducks in Europe. Applying AM to huntable species with relatively good population data as models for broader implementation represents a cost effective way of starting to develop AM on a European flyway scale for ducks and other harvested waterbirds.