North American Waterbird Conservation Plan

Conservation requires a broad range activities over a huge geographical area, multiple scales of planning and implementation, and the involvement numerous partners from government and nongovernmental organizations, from the scientific community, and from local citizenry. The Waterbird Conservation for the Americas initiative was launched to facilitate and guide these activities.

The initiative...

• is an international, broad-based voluntary partnership dedicated to conserving waterbirds and their habitats.
• has as a vision that the distribution, diversity, and abundance of populations and habitats of breeding, migratory, and nonbreeding waterbirds are sustained or restored throughout the lands and waters of the Americas.
• provides a means of formalizing alliances to plan and implement waterbird conservation cooperatively with other bird initiatives and other national and regional strategies for species and habitat conservation.
• conducts planning in order to identify partners and opportunities to address long-term waterbird conservation and to provide an overarching hemispheric-scale framework and guide for conserving waterbirds.
• advocates and drives involvement in broader, hemisphere-wide monitoring and conservation; provides an impetus for regional conservation planning; proposes national, state, provincial and other local conservation planning and action; and gives a larger context for local habitat protection.
• identifies priorities, thereby catalyzing and focusing resources and actions, as it is only with collective funding and effort that coordinated conservation of waterbirds can proceed.

North American Waterbird Conservation Plan