The piping plover (Charadrius melodus) is a small sand-colored, sparrow-sized shorebird that nests and feeds along coastal sand and gravel beaches in North America.

[6] Their breeding habitat includes beaches and sand flats on the Atlantic coast, the shores of the Great Lakes, and in the mid-west of Canada and the United States.

Generally, piping plovers will forage for food around the high tide wrack zone and along the water's edge.

The piping plover is a stout bird with a large rounded head, a short thick neck, and a stubby bill.

The piping plover lives the majority of its life on open sandy beaches or rocky shores, often in high, dry sections away from water.

As human coastal management strategies worked to minimize unpredictable flooding, their old habitats often became overgrown, and their populations declined.

Nowadays, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is forced to artificially clear shoals on the Platte and Missouri River to maintain some of the plovers' remaining habitat in the Great Plains.

However, modern mining practices typically transport much of this waste sand to more remote areas, often to reuse it commercially, which limits colonization opportunities for these birds.

When pairs are formed, the male begins digging out several scrapes (nests) along the high shore near the beach-grass line.

The male begins a mating ritual of standing upright and "marching" towards the female, puffing himself up and quickly stomping his legs.

[18][19] While it is federally threatened, the piping plover has been listed as state endangered in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Protecting the Piper with full beach closures, the Refuge now "has the second largest plover population on the [Massachusetts] North Shore".

[26] The second decline in the piping plover's population and range has been attributed to increased development, shoreline stabilization efforts,[27] habitat loss and human activity near nesting sites in the decades following World War II.

[22] On the Missouri River sandbars, the number of breeding individuals varied, with the population increasing from 2012 to 2017 following a major habitat creation event.

[29] Current conservation strategies include identification and preservation of known nesting sites; public education; limiting or preventing pedestrian and/or off-road vehicle (ORV) traffic near nests and hatched chicks; limiting predation of free-ranging cats, dogs and other pets on breeding pairs, eggs and chicks;[30] and removal of foxes, raccoons, skunks, and other predators.

The Goldenrod Foundation unsuccessfully filed suit against the Town of Plymouth in 2010 and 2015 to restrict offroad vehicle access to breeding habitat.

[42] As shorebirds, piping plovers may be highly impacted by climate change, as it affects their aquatic and their terrestrial habitats.

At the same time, the disturbance-dependent nature of their habitat makes their relationship to climate change more complex than of most other bird species.

Because of these high temperatures, piping plovers (along with other ground-nesting bird species) have specific strategies and behaviors for thermal regulation of their nests and themselves.

Piping plovers who breed in this region depend on the decreased water levels to reveal shorelines that they use for nesting.

This suggests that the warming climate and increased water levels and precipitation will degrade piping plover breeding habitats in the Prairie Pothole Region.

[44] On the other hand, research suggests that piping plover's habitat in Nebraska, on the shoals of Platte and Missouri River and around Lewis and Clark Lake would benefit from climate change, as it would make extensive flooding (so called "high-flow events") which keeps the shoals from getting overgrown occur more often than it does now, yet closer to the historical, pre-European colonization of the Americas patterns.

The ideal frequency of high-flow events for piping plover population abundance in this river system is once in four years.

Shoreline stabilization efforts reduced such high-flow events to once per twenty years, which is not enough to maintain piping plover populations outside of artificially cleared shoals, which become their only refuge in the long term.

However, it is more plausible that in at least the near term, climate change adaptation efforts to protect human property in the area would continue to suppress high-flow events and negate this benefit to piping plover populations, while also making them more vulnerable to a potential, unprecedented catastrophic flooding event which could overwhelm those efforts and also submerge piping plover subpopulations across the entire area.

[7] Climate change is also causing sea level rise, which may affect the piping plover's other main habitat, the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. and Canada.

Florida coastline species are at particular risk to climate change because of not just sea level rise, but also increased tropical storms.

[46] Research also shows that of the shorebird species affected by the Florida coastline transformation, piping plovers are at high risk of decline.

[46] In May 2023, the United States Postal Service released a piping plover Forever stamp as part of the Endangered Species set, based on a photograph from Joel Sartore's Photo Ark.

The stamp was dedicated at a ceremony at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, one of the biggest nesting sites for piping plovers.