Treesearch

International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD) was created in 1993 to increase public awareness, education, and concern for migratory birds and their habitats. As a day of recognition, it serves as both a celebration and a call to conservation action.4 Programmatically, IMBD offers resources to celebrants in the form of a suite of promotional and educational products as well as via communication networks such as listservs and webpages. IMBD also can provide celebrants with a focus in the form of an annual, general theme. Themes have included the importance of wetlands, the recovery of the...

Public awareness and concern are crucial components of migratory bird conservation. Citizens who are enthusiastic about birds, informed about threats, and empowered to become involved in addressing those threats can make a tremendous contribution to maintaining healthy bird populations. One of the most successful vehicles for public education on migratory birds is International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD).

One in eight bird species in the world have a real risk of becoming extinct in the next 100 years (Birdlife International 2000). About three-fourths of these species occur in forests and over half of these species suffer from severe fragmentation of their habitats. Tropical deforestation is the major reason for bird decline in the world (Youth 2003). Almost half the forests that once covered the Earth are gone, and deforestation is expanding and accelerating (Abramovitz 1998).

The demographics of bird watchers have recently become a topic of increased interest. Race or nationality is one demographic parameter that has been discussed in some depth. This paper further quantifies the relative prevalence of African Americans among U.S. bird watchers and identifies potential barriers that may prevent African Americans from becoming bird watchers. Two questionnaires (one for bird watchers and one for African Americans) were developed and distributed from August 2000 to June 2001. One-third of the 322 respondents to the bird watching questionnaire had never met an...

Planning for bird conservation has become increasingly reliant on remote sensing, geographical information systems, and, especially, models used to predict the occurrence of bird species as well as their density and demographics. We address the role of such tools by contrasting two models used in bird conservation. One, the Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) productivity model, is very detailed, mechanistic, and based on an enormous body of research. The Mallard model has been extensively used with success to guide management efforts for Mallards and certain other species of ducks. The other...

We have used a place-based decision support system for several years to identify bird conservation issues relating to the management and planning needs of resource managers. Public and private land managers are constantly seeking better ways to incorporate landscape, species, and habitat relationships into the conservation planning process. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is engaged in long-term planning for federal lands under their jurisdiction as part of the Congressionally-mandated Comprehensive Conservation Planning process. The National Park Service is undertaking an inventory and...

National Wildlife Refuges must manage habitats to support a variety of species that often have conflicting needs. To make reasonable management decisions, managers must know what species are priorities for their refuges and the relative importance of the species. Unfortunately, species priorities are often set regionally, but refuges must develop local priorities that reconcile regional priorities with constraints imposed by refuge location and local management options. Some species cannot be managed on certain refuges, and the relative benefit of management to regional populations of...

A common goal of conservation and management plans is to maintain populations of species of conservation concern at some historic level that was a product of environmental conditions at a time when they were less influenced by humans than at present (e.g., Wade 1993, Reijnders 1994, Polacheck et al. 1999). Conservation planning also includes consideration of the distribution, abundance, and reproductive success of a species, all of which are affected by both the amount and spatial pattern of habitat (Donovan et al. 1995, Trzcinski et al. 1999, Pidgeon et al. 2003). However, in regions like...

The Important Bird Areas (IBA) Program was developed by BirdLife International as an approach to conserving birds and associated biodiversity throughout the world. The IBA program seeks to identify and protect a network of sites, at a biogeographic scale, which are critical for the long-term viability of naturally occurring bird populations for which site-based conservation is appropriate. The IBA program, run by national organizations in each country, consists of four stages: site identification, site designation, advocacy and action, and assessment and monitoring. In the Americas the IBA...

In the southern part of South America, knowledge about bird species distribution is still not used as a tool for land use planning and conservation priority-setting. BirdLife International’s Important Bird Areas (IBA) Program is an appropriate vehicle for analyzing existing information about birds, and to generate new data where necessary. IBA inventories should provide input to urgent regional conservation issues, such as those relating to temperate and subtropical grasslands. There is a rich avifauna of grassland-specialist species in Argentina, of which approximately 25 are threatened...