Proximity to oil wells in North Dakota does not impact nest success of ducks but lowers nest densities

Abstract

Over the past decade, the United States has seen a rapid increase in oil and gas extraction from areas where resources were previously thought to be unrecoverable, particularly the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota. The Bakken overlaps with the Prairie Pothole Region, the most critical habitat in North America for breeding ducks, where oil and gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing has the potential to impact more than a million duck pairs in the United States alone. Here, we evaluated the effect of oil and gas development on nesting ducks in 2015–2017 across 5 counties in North Dakota. Using data from ~4,000 nests we found that nest survival was higher at sites composed of a higher percentage of grassland, and for nests found closer to major roads. We found no effect of any metric of oil and gas extraction activity on duck nest survival. Using survival-corrected estimates of nest density, we found higher densities of nests closer to roads, but lower nest densities at sites surrounded by more wells. Our top-ranked model indicated that nest density was predicted to decline by 14% relative to sites with no development, given the average number of wells (3.15 wells) within 1,500 m of a site. However, within a nesting field, we found no evidence that ducks were avoiding petroleum-related infrastructure at smaller spatial scales. Our results indicate mixed effects of oil and gas development on nesting waterfowl, and highlight both the resiliency of dabbing ducks to environmental change and the need for additional research on other aspects of duck breeding biology.

Multiscale nest‐site selection of ducks in the western boreal forest of Alberta

“…For example, upland nesting ducks in Quebec's boreal forest showed no change in abundance in association with clear cuts (Lemelin et al, 2007 ). In North Dakota's Bakken formation, nest survival was driven mostly by grassland cover and there was no effect detected from oil and gas development (Skaggs et al, 2020 ). While other evidence from North Dakota suggests a small negative effect of oil and gas development on brood abundance; however, the effect was only evident for a small percentage of the population (Kemink et al, 2019 ) and there was no evidence for pair avoidance during settling (Loesch et al, 2021 ).…”

Reassessing perennial cover as a driver of duck nest survival in the Prairie Pothole Region

“…We used nest monitoring data from several cooperators, from published and unpublished works collected from 2002–2018, to compare models explaining variation in nest survival: Fisk (2010), Pieron and Rohwer (2010), Docken (2011), Grant and Shaffer (2012), Buxton (2013), Solem (2013), Haffele et al (2013), Skone et al (2015), Borgo and Conover (2016), Martorelli (2017), Sherfy et al (2018 a , b ), and Skaggs et al (2020). Nest searching, marking, and monitoring procedures varied by project and cooperator but generally followed methods described by Klett et al (1986).…”

Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Thermal Imaging Cameras to Conduct Duck Brood Surveys

“…Annual efforts to broadly characterize the distribution of breeding pairs across the PPR (Reynolds et al 2006, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2018) and intermittent attempts to characterize nest survival (Greenwood et al 1995, Stephens et al 2005, Skone et al 2016, Ringelman et al 2018, Skaggs et al 2020), largely drive conservation strategies in the region. Although metrics like nest survival rates provide useful indices for evaluating management actions (Pieron and Rohwer 2010), potentially low rates of post‐hatch duckling survival (Stafford and Pearse 2007) limit the utility of nesting studies for estimating waterfowl production (Amundson et al 2013).…”