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Audubon’s New Report Meets the Urgency of the Moment at Great Salt Lake
The Great Salt Lake Birds and Habitat Assessment offers finding to guide coordinated efforts to save this vital ecosystem.
After reaching a record low in 2022, effective management and above-average snowpack helped raise and sustain Great Salt Lake water levels. Unfortunately, in 2026, drought and below-average snowpack are again threatening a return to historic lows. As the lake shrinks, the food web that sustains millions of birds begins to unravel. The wetlands that frame its shores are also under pressure from sustained drought, urban growth, water diversions, and the relentless spread of invasive plants. The window to act—to protect what remains and restore what is still restorable—is narrowing.
National Audubon Society’s new report, the Great Salt Lake Birds and Habitat Assessment meets the urgency of this moment. The science-based analysis is designed to inform conservation strategies across the Great Salt Lake watershed and support Audubon’s strategic priorities, with its core goal focusing on protecting birds and the places they need, today and tomorrow.
Every spring and fall, something remarkable happens over the northern Utah desert. The sky fills. Not with clouds, but with birds—millions of them—wheeling, diving, resting on shimmering, salt-crusted mudflats. Wilson’s Phalaropes spin in tight circles on the water’s surface, creating small vortexes that pull invertebrates up from below. American Avocets wade in the shallow bays, skimming the surface with upturned bills. Eared Grebes arrive in waves so dense they seem to darken the open lake, gorging on brine shrimp before they continue their journeys to their wintering grounds. And every winter, when much of the continent’s waterbird population has funneled south, thousands of Common Goldeneye, Northern Pintail, and Tundra Swan linger in the bays and the wetlands of the Great Salt Lake basin, finding open water and food in a landscape that would otherwise offer little.
But Great Salt Lake is also a place where birds live. The largest breeding colony of American White Pelican in the western United States nests on rocky islands within the lake itself. Snowy Plovers scrape nests into the sunbaked sediment of vast playas. White-faced Ibis nest by the tens of thousands in the managed wetlands surrounding the lake, wading through flooded fields and marshes to feed their young.
This is a year-round network. A living, breathing ecosystem that is never truly quiet—a place of beginnings and endings and everything in between for some 12 million birds, including 339 species that use it annually.
Audubon’s Great Salt Lake Birds and Habitat Assessment (Assessment) provides a spatial framework for understanding where bird habitat is most vital today, where it is most likely to matter under future climate conditions, and how water moves through the watershed to sustain it all. This Assessment aims to align conservation priorities and guide coordinated action for Great Salt Lake’s landscape to protect birds and the habitats they depend on.
The Assessment draws on habitat suitability models for 19 indicator bird species across all seasons (breeding, nonbreeding, and migration) combined with 2050 climate projections and a hydrologic connectivity analysis that maps the potential pathways by which water may reach the lake as return-flows from wetlands and flood-irrigated agricultural fields across the watershed. The result is a layered, interactive tool and actionable takeaways that can inform conservation practitioners, water and land managers, land use planners, and policymakers can use to identify where conservation will have the most durable impact for waterbirds.
Its most important finding is simply: Protecting Great Salt Lake also means protecting the system around it, which requires protecting the water that flows from it.
Habitat prioritization must consider the intrinsic value of individual sites and their functional connectivity within the broader landscape. Isolated habitat patches, no matter how high-quality, may not support viable populations if they lack connectivity to other habitats or to essential water sources. A system-level perspective that accounts for hydrologic connectivity, habitat connectivity, and supports the full annual cycle needs of migratory birds at a hemispheric scale is necessary to guide effective conservation action.
Birds do not experience habitat as humans draw it on maps. They experience a landscape, and they need it to be functionally whole—connected, wetted, and alive across its full extent. When any piece of that mosaic disappears, the loss ripples outward in ways that are difficult to predict and often impossible to reverse.
As a longtime champion of Great Salt Lake, Audubon will use the findings from this Assessment to help guide its ongoing work at the lake including managing Gillmor Sanctuary—the only sanctuary managed for shorebirds—and in its groundbreaking work co-leading the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust. The Assessment also yields several key findings for other conservation partners working in the Great Salt Lake watershed. In addition to state and federal managers, private landowners, agricultural operators, water rights holders and local governments are essential partners for taking advantage of the opportunity to maintain the necessary redundancy and ecological integrity that sustains the region’s exceptional waterbird diversity.
. . .
Great Salt Lake is both a regional and a global resource. As one of the largest saline lakes in the Western Hemisphere it generates biological productivity that few ecosystems on earth can rival, supports 7,700 local jobs and nearly $2.1 billion in annual economic output, and is a source of identity and community heritage. Its waters bloom with brine shrimp and brine flies in extraordinary densities, providing a super abundant food source for birds that have traveled thousands of miles and need to travel thousands more.
Understanding Great Salt Lake requires understanding everything connected to it. The lake itself is surrounded by roughly 350,000 acres of wetlands—managed ponds, seasonal mudflats, emergent marshes, rain-fed playas, and wet meadows that together form a diverse mosaic of bird habitat.
For Utahns and visitors alike, the lake and its surrounding wetlands are a source of wonder, recreation, and identity. Birders travel from across the country to witness the spectacle of shorebird migration. Hunters have pursued waterfowl in the lake’s marshes for generations. Families watch as the Eared Grebe dive below the surface from the causeway at Antelope Island State Park. That connection to Great Salt Lake is part of why this moment is so urgent, and why we need a science-based framework to help inform action that’s focused on maintaining the hydrologic and land connections across the Great Salt Lake ecosystem.
Great Salt Lake is in trouble, but it is not lost. What remains is still among the most spectacular concentrations of birds anywhere in North America.
The phalaropes are still spinning. The pelicans are still nesting on the islands. The pintails still pour south in autumn, banking over the marshes in the dawn light.
Their continued presence here depends on continuing the focus on managing tradeoffs in the watershed and taking steps to maintain water flows to the lake and the wetlands. Audubon built this Assessment because the birds deserve our best thinking and because the people who love this place deserve to know that the case for protecting it is a strong as the system itself, when it is whole.
Partners looking to access the interactive web tool please contact: salinelakes@audubon.org