Treesearch

In working towards a vision of integrated bird conservation, scientists, conservationists, land managers, and administrators are faced with a variety of scientific, managerial, administrative, and logistical challenges and complexities. The broad scope of integrated bird conservation requires organizations to work together to conserve birds across taxonomic groups, across landscapes, across geopolitical boundaries, and across social, economic, and political groups. This is no small task. While the benefits of achieving such an integrated approach are numerous and far-reaching, the effort...

Since 1998, Audubon's Christmas Bird Count (CBC) has been supported by an Internet-based data entry application that was initially designed to accommodate the traditional paper-based methods of this long-running bird monitoring program. The first efforts to computerize the data and the entry procedures have informed a planned strategy to revise the current technology tools supporting the needs of the CBC. A tightly integrated life-cycle development path, outlined within, has now been employed to revise the CBC application. This document will give a brief overview of this process.

An increasing number of bird monitoring projects are assembling massive quantities of data into numerous decentralized and locally administered storage systems. These data sources have enormous significance to a wide range of disciplines, but knowing that they exist and gaining access to them is difficult if not impossible. Attempts are being made to organize these data sources into a unified data resource, with the biggest challenge being to develop an infrastructure that facilitates data integration without compromising local control, and maintaining, when appropriate, the privacy of the...

We estimate that from 500 million to possibly over 1 billion birds are killed annually in the United States due to anthropogenic sources including collisions with human-made structures such as vehicles, buildings and windows, power lines, communication towers, and wind turbines; electrocutions; oil spills and other contaminants; pesticides; cat predation; and commercial fishing by-catch. Many of the deaths from these sources would be considered unlawful take under federal laws such as the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. In...

In 1997 we began investigating the use of roadside point counts to monitor the long-term status and trends of Puerto Rican bird populations. If such a methodology proves feasible it may provide the empirical data needed for the development of sound conservation plans for the island’s avifauna in much the same way that North American Breeding Bird Survey data are used by the avian conservation prioritization process of Partners in Flight, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Canadian Wildlife Service. By the end of the 2003 field season, we will have the data needed to quantitatively...

In the past decade, more than one hundred thousand breeding bird occurrences have been recorded on Southern National Forests in the United Sates. The majority of these occurrences have been geo-referenced using global positioning satellite (GPS) technology. This spatial information is available for use as a coverage in several geographic information system (GIS) applications. ArcView GIS software was used to overlay selected occurrence records with other habitat coverages (e.g., soils, hydrology, vegetation, elevation, and land use). Multiple years of accumulated bird point count data has...

In 1996, Region 8 of the U. S. Forest Service implemented a program to monitor landbirds on southeastern U.S. national forests. The goal was to develop a monitoring system that could document population trends and bird-habitat relationships. Using power analysis, we examined the ability of the monitoring program to detect population trends (3 percent annual change) at three spatial scales: ranger district, national forest, and physiographic province. The monitoring program did not detect trends adequately at the district scale and success at the forest level varied on the intensity of...

The Northern Region Landbird Monitoring Program (NRLMP) has been in place for nearly a decade and is designed to allow us to track population trends of numerous landbird species, while at the same time allowing us to investigate the effects of various kinds of land use activity on the occurrence, abundance, or demographics of numerous landbird species. We conduct pointcount bird surveys biennially at about 350 permanently marked 10-point roadside transects that have been positioned in a geographically stratified fashion throughout USFS lands in northern Idaho and Montana. On alternate...

The 16-year-old Nicolet National Forest Bird Survey is the longest-running volunteer monitoring program on any U.S. national forest. Every year, teams of volunteer observers led by at least one expert with proven field experience sample more than 250 permanent points during the second weekend in June. Altogether 512 points are monitored, approximately half during a given year. Observers use a standard 10-minute point count, separated into three time intervals (0-3 min, 3-5 min, 5-10 min) and three bird-to-observer distance categories (<50 m, 50-100 m, >100m). Since 1989, 75- 100 volunteers...

We established breeding bird monitoring programs in three National Forests in northern Minnesota (Superior and Chippewa in 1991) and northern Wisconsin (Chequamegon in 1992). A total of 134, 169, and 132 stands (1,272 survey points) have been surveyed annually in these forests through 2002. We examined trends in relative abundance for 53 species in the Chequamegon, 51 species in the Chippewa, and 41 species in the Superior. Thirty-six species were also tested for regional trends by combining data from the three forests. Twenty-four species increased significantly (P < 0.05) in at least one...