Landbird monitoring protocol for Channel Islands National Park – Version 2.0

Coonan, Timothy; Dye, Linda; Fancy, Steven

This protocol outlines the rationale, sampling design, field methods, data management and analysis procedures, and reporting procedures for monitoring landbirds at Channel Islands National Park. The protocol narrative describes the landbird monitoring program in relatively broad terms, following the protocol standards developed by the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Program (Oakley et al. 2003). The details of the sampling design, field methodology, and procedures for managing, analyzing, and reporting the data are addressed in a set of stand-alone Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that are incorporated within this document. This protocol is primarily a compilation of sections from landbird monitoring protocols developed by other networks in the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Program, as well as material from various reports produced by Channel Islands National Park staff. Channel Islands National Park was the first park in the National Park System to design and implement a long-term ecological monitoring program to track changes in the condition of terrestrial and marine natural resources that the park is responsible for managing. Monitoring of landbirds began on several of the islands in the park in 1993, and since then, the sampling design, methodology, database, and data analysis and reporting procedures have been reviewed and improved and are now formalized in this protocol document. In April 2000, a formal technical review of the landbird monitoring program at Channel Islands National Park was undertaken by eight renowned experts in bird monitoring who recommended that the park add some new point count sites using distance sampling in addition to the line transect surveys that had previously been used. Because of funding and staffing constraints, the full transition to the new sampling design, which involved establishing the new sampling sites and conducting monitoring at both the old and new sites for at least three years, was not fully completed until 2008. This protocol was written in 2011 to document the landbird monitoring methods conducted since 1993 and to formalize the methods that are now used to monitor landbirds on the five islands in the park. A new database in MS Access has been developed to store and summarize the landbird data, and statistical and graphing routines using the statistical package R have been developed to streamline the process for analyzing data and generating reports.

Landbird monitoring protocol for Channel Islands National Park – Version 2.0

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