The Mudflat Half the World's Spoon-billed Sandpipers Depend On

The Yellow Sea's intertidal flats are the refuelling stop for millions of migratory shorebirds, and China has lost much of them to land reclamation, aquaculture ponds and invasive Spartina cordgrass. Spoon-billed Sandpiper in China, founded in 2014 and based in Shanghai, focused on Tiaozini in southern Jiangsu, where the critically endangered spoon-billed sandpiper moults each autumn alongside Nordmann's greenshank and far eastern curlew. Its counts — 225 birds at Tiaozini in 2017 and 240 across Tiaozini, Yangkou and Dongling in 2020, roughly half the world's adult population — became the evidence base that halted a reclamation scheme and supported the 2019 inscription of the Yellow Sea–Bohai Gulf migratory bird habitat as China's first coastal World Natural Heritage site. Alongside the surveys the group runs school photo exhibitions and local outreach, and the mudflat's birds have since become a tourism draw the surrounding towns advertise.