Ecomorphology, the field that looks at the relationship between the morphological features of an organism and its ecology, is a valuable framework that has been applied to answer a wide variety of questions on evolution, ecology, and spatial biodiversity. Here, I focus on the relationship between the skull morphology in a highly diverse order of sea and shorebirds (the Charadriiformes) and its relationship to foraging ecology as a framework to address several questions. After Chapter 1 introduces past research on ecomorphology, Chapter 2 uses 3D morphometric data describing skull shapes of 262 charadriiform species in conjunction with ecological data to understand if foraging ecology, as opposed to allometry (shape changes due to size changes), is the primary predictor of skull shape. This chapter reveals that the predictors of charadriiform skull shape vary depending on the phylogenetic level of analysis, with foraging ecology as the primary predictor at the ordinal level. Chapter 3 focuses on interpreting this relationship between skull shape and foraging ecology and analyzing if the variation seen is the result of the beak evolving semi-independently from the braincase. The analyses in this chapter suggest the charadriiform skull has evolved as two semi-independent sets of bones, or modules, with the module composed of the beak and it's biomechanically associated structures relating more strongly to foraging ecology then the module composed of the braincase. Chapter 4 builds upon this now-established relationship between charadriiform skull shape and foraging ecology to investigate the biodiversity of Charadriiformes across the Midwest and East Coast of the United States with a specific focus on synthesizing morphological data with temporal community assemblage data to understand the relationship between protected areas and charadriiform communities that see pronounced intra-annual changes due to migration. This chapter demonstrated the highly variable spatiotemporal land use patterns of charadriiform birds and provided a preliminary framework for accounting for migration in spatial biodiversity analyses. Chapter 5 reemphasizes how the use of ecomorphology throughout all of these chapters has provided an efficient way to provide broad-scale insights into both macroevolution and present-day spatial biodiversity and suggests future areas of research that expand upon the analyses here.