Assessing and reducing threats to mountain birds on the Appalachian Trail through monitoring, modeling, and GIS analysis.
Scarl JC. 2012. Assessing and reducing threats to mountain birds on the Appalachian Trail through monitoring, modeling, and GIS analysis.. Vermont Center for Ecostudies. White River Jct, Vermont.
Final report presented to the National Park Service under Cooperative Agreement H1818-07-0020. Mountain Birdwatch (MBW) is a long-term monitoring project for songbirds that breed in high elevation forests of the northeastern United States and Canada. MBW’s primary focus is Bicknell’s Thrush, a montane-fir specialist that breeds only in the Northeastern U.S. and adjacent portions of Canada. Initiated in 2000, MBW trained citizen scientists to conduct annual surveys along point-count routes in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. In 2010, MBW incorporated several protocol improvements, including a randomized selection of routes across the northeastern United States, a revised survey protocol to allow for more stringent statistical analyses, and an expansion into Canada to ensure consistent surveys across the entire breeding range of Bicknell’s Thrush. 2011 yielded three notable accomplishments for the newly-launched program, Mountain Birdwatch 2.0 (MBW2): 1) a transition to volunteer-based surveys in the U.S.; 2) a completed launch of the full program in Canada, and 3) the establishment of a sub-sample of routes in NY and VT to more closely examine trends in the southernmost habitat of the Bicknell’s Thrush breeding range. In the US, Bicknell’s Thrush was detected at 32% of points, a detection rate that will allow us to achieve 80% power to detect a 3% annual change in Bicknell’s Thrush abundance over 30 years at a significance level of 0.1. In Canada, detection rates were much lower (<10% of points with BITH detections), causing us to evaluate what potential program modifications will allow us to continue an international monitoring scheme while still achieving our goals. A single season occupancy analysis of United States data elucidates some of the variables related to Bicknell’s Thrush expected occupancy in the southernmost reaches of the species’ breeding habitat.