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Migratory shorebirds are currently at significant risk, with populations of multiple species dropping globally, often due to habitat disruption and loss. The coast of northern Brazil, along the states of Pará and Maranhão, encompasses one of the broadest expanses of shorebird overwintering habitat for many shorebird species in the Atlantic Americas Flyway. Delineating how current management protects shorebird habitat is an important first step to identifying gaps in protections that then need to be prioritized. Different frameworks of conservation decision-making, such as focusing on flagship, umbrella, or biodiversity, can be used to prioritize what habitat needs to be protected. Understanding the effects of these different conservation perspectives is key to making informed management decisions. Multiple dates of Landsat 8 imagery at different tidal stages were used to identify intertidal habitats for further analysis. MaxEnt species distribution models were derived for each species using remote sensing and landscape metrics, as well as point-count survey data collected during the winters of 2016 and 2017. Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 image data were included as direct inputs to the model rather than interpreted and mapped first into different habitat types. The resulting Maxent models successfully delineated between presence and absence locations for five of the eight target shorebird species. The model outputs were combined to map the intertidal habitat covered under several different management scenarios. These scenarios included using red knots as a flagship species, semipalmated sandpipers as an umbrella species, and species richness as a metric of shorebird diversity. Slightly more than 25% of delineated intertidal habitat was found to be included within a designated Marine Extractive Reserve, with three major gaps in current protections identified. The flagship, umbrella, and biodiversity perspectives result in different prioritizations of these distinct locations. While umbrella and diversity approaches are successful at protecting diverse communities, community assemblages of rarer or specialist species, such as the red knots, may fall outside their protective shadows. A hybrid approach that uses both diversity and the extent of rare flagship species produces results that best meet the management goals of identifying gaps in existing conservation to protect the most at-risk species while conserving the diverse assemblages they coexist with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satellite precipitation estimates are used as an alternative or as a supplement to the records of the in situ stations. Although some satellite precipitation products have reasonably consistent time series, they are often limited to specific geographic areas. The main objective of this study was to evaluate CHIRPS version 2, MSWEP version 2, and PERSIANN-CDR, compared to gridBR, as daily mean and extreme inputs represented on a monthly scale and their respective seasonal trends of rainfall in the Mearim River Drainage Basin (MDB), Maranhão state, Brazil. Estimates of errors were calculated (relative error, pbias; root mean square error, RMSE, and Willmott concordance index, d), and the chances of precipitation were estimated by remote sensing (RES). In addition, trends in precipitation were estimated by the two-sample Mann–Kendall test. Given the overall performance, the best products for estimating monthly mean daily rainfall in the MDB are CHIRPS and PERSIANN-CDR, especially for rainy months (December to May). For daily extremes on the monthly scale, the best RES is PERSIANN-CDR. There is no general agreement between gridBR and RES methods for the trend signal, even a nonsignificant one, much less a significant one. The use of MSWEP for the MDB region is discouraged by this study because it overestimates monthly averages and extremes. Finally, studies of this kind in drainage basins are essential to improve the information generated for managing territories and developing regionalized climate and hydrological models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]