The International Ornithological Congress (IOC) has announced that it will split Lesser Sand Plover into two species:

Tibetan Sand Plover Charadrius atrifrons (including pamirensis and schaeferi) and Siberian Sand Plover C. mongolus (formerly referred to as Mongolian Sand Plover) (including stegmanni)

This is based on phenotypic differences and phylogenetic analysis which demonstrates paraphyly of these two taxa relative to Greater Sand Plover Charadrius leschenaultii (Livezey 2010; Wei et al. 2022).

Lesser Sandplover, copyright Yoav Perlman, from the surfbirds galleries

Recent genetic analysis of the broader sand plover species complex published earlier this year makes a compelling case for the mongolus and stegmanni subspecies of Lesser Sand Plover (what we’d formerly colloquially referred to as Mongolian Sand Plover) to be split into a distinct species, Siberian Sand Plover. Turns out they’re more closely related to Greater Sand Plover than they are to the atrifons, pamirensis, and schaeferi subspecies of Lesser Sand Plover – which, in turn, should in their own right be considered to fall under the umbrella of Tibetan Sand Plover. That proposed split is now on the current proposals list at the IOC, so there seems a strong chance it’s going to be formalised sooner than later.

Breeding distribution and sampling sites of Charadrius mongolus/leschenaultii complex. The species distribution was derived from BirdLife International data zone (http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/requestdis). It is important to note that some of the sampling sites are from migratory routes. (© Chentao Wei et al. Plover drawings © Ian Lewington)

Of the six previous British and one Irish records, all have been assigned to Siberian Sand Plover except for the 2002 record from Rimac in Lincolnshire and the 1997 record from Pagham Harbour in Sussex which are Tibetan Sand Plover