Management Goals

Refuge management goals are:

• Provide and manage a diversity of high quality habitats to support breeding, migrating and/or wintering birds, threatened & endangered species and fish.
• Maintain high quality habitats for all native wildlife and plant species.
• Establish and maintain partnerships to benefit wildlife for present and future generations.

Invasive Species

Refuge staff are founding members of the Long Island Invasive Species Management Area. Networking with other members and attending periodic public meetings has helped us realize the most problematic non-native species, develop mapping standards, prioritize treatment regimens and prepare outreach materials.

Prescribed Fire

This management technique benefits a variety of natural resources. In areas where prescribed fire has been used, the refuge has been able to reduce the natural buildup of fuels offering better protection from wildfire and restore a natural ecological process to wildlands. Burning helps to maintain fire dependent vegetation (pitch pine, warm seasonal grasses), manage grasslands, remove non‑native plants and improve feeding and nesting areas for wildlife.

Wetland Monitoring

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with the U.S. Geological Survey on a salt marsh integrity study to develop protocols to measure important components in marsh habitats such as vegetation, soils and wildlife use. The study results will help to inform refuge staff on how we can sustain these critical habitats in the challenge of environmental threats such as storm events, habitat loss and sea level rise.

Bat Monitoring

The refuge has been involved in both acoustic monitoring and mist netting of bats. Acoustic monitoring is the process of recording bat echolocations in the wild for the purposes of understanding how many and what types of bats reside in an area. Mist netting is a popular and important tool for monitoring species diversity, relative abundance, and population size in birds and bats. In 2012, mist netting efforts on the refuge were funded by the Brookhaven National Laboratory (Department of Energy). A total of 32 big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus), 7 eastern red bats (Lasiurus borealis), and 10 northern bats (Myotis septentrionalis) were captured during mist netting.