Science has always been at the core of our work. Manomet is focused on science-driven solutions to improve ecosystem health and human well-being, and we carry out original science to help drive change.

Research and monitoring drive our science activities. Our research efforts include shorebird and landbird conservation, fisheries, forestry, and social science applied to conservation. These disciplines are core to understanding and informing our work to address flyway health, resilient habitats including coastal ecosystems, and working lands and seas. Through all of our work, we hope to understand the impacts of climate change on species distribution and health.

Applying science is core to everything we do. By providing technical guidance tools and clearly communicating scientific results to stakeholders, we ensure that our science is used to achieve practical solutions.

Manomet conducts long-term science in many areas, including shorebird and landbird conservation, fisheries management, and climate impacts on forest systems. Long-term data sets in these fields are extremely valuable, especially for measuring and adapting to impacts from a changing climate. We plan to expand our work in each of these fields, focusing on science directly connected to improving conservation outcomes. We are also expanding our expertise in social science, so conservation actions in these fields can be applied more effectively.

We are prioritizing several initiatives in the coming years, including the use of cutting-edge technology, like satellite tracking and advanced audio recording techniques and analysis methods, to help monitor wildlife populations.

Additionally, we are expanding the International Shorebird Survey, the longest-running citizen science program on shorebirds, to better measure changing populations and the impacts of conservation activities at critical sites.

Sea bird holding food in beak
American Oystercatcher

We have been successful in our efforts to recover American Oystercatchers, achieving a 24% increase in the population on the U.S. coast, and aim to reach the 30% increase goal we established with our extensive partnerships.

Finally, we are expanding our survey work across the Arctic, working with a large partnership to reach our goal of measuring population size and trends in half the time originally planned so that we can more effectively guide our hemispheric shorebird conservation activities.

Across all of our work, we share a commitment to making science more accessible and inclusive. In early 2021, we launched an Open Science initiative to increase access to our science, which will include open-source publication whenever possible, openly documented research methods and analyses, and efforts to make our scientific results widely accessible.

Manomet's Research

Manomet has been steeped in science since its beginnings and values research and monitoring to inform management decisions on the ground. There has never been a greater need to monitor changes in our natural world and to apply this information to understand where to target our efforts and which management strategies are most effective.

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