Protocol for monitoring landbird communities in Southeast Coast Network Parks

Byrne, Michael; DeVivo, Joseph; Wright, Christina; Thompson, Emma; Jones, Clark

The National Park Service (NPS) Southeast Coast Inventory and Monitoring Network (SECN) has initiated landbird community monitoring in 17 SECN parks. These include: Canaveral National Seashore (CANA), Cape Hatteras National Seashore (CAHA), Cape Lookout National Seashore (CALO), Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area (CHAT), Congaree National Park (CONG), Cumberland Island National Seashore (CUIS), Horseshoe Bend National Military Park (HOBE), Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park (KEMO), Fort Caroline National Memorial (FOCA), Fort Frederica National Monument (FOFR), Fort Matanzas National Monument (FOMA), Fort Pulaski National Monument (FOPU), Fort Sumter National Monument (FOSU), Moores Creek National Battlefield (MOCR), Ocmulgee National Monument (OCMU), and Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve (TIMU). Parks within the SECN occur along the south Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to central Florida and inland to north Georgia, eastern Alabama, and central South Carolina. SECN parks encompass approximately 185,000 acres (75,000 ha) of federally-owned property. The NPS Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program originated from the 1999 Natural Resource Challenge, with the goal of understanding, measuring, and improving the health of park ecosystems. To achieve this goal, the SECN pursued an in-depth scoping process to identify the factors influencing park resources and the elements, or Vital Signs, to be measured that would provide park managers with the best understanding of the health of park resources. Because of their potential to serve as indicators of several natural and anthropogenic stressors and as an indicator of the condition of park resources, landbird communities were selected as a Vital Sign for the SECN. The objectives of this protocol are: • Determine the status and trends in species richness and diversity of the landbird community at each park. • Determine the status and trends in occupancy by selected landbird species. • Determine the status and trends in frequency of detection of selected landbirds. • Determine trends in the vocalization phenology of select landbirds with high detectability. • Determine the similarity in the species assemblage of samples collected with the automated recording device and variable radius circular plot point count methodologies. The landbird community is monitored in the spring with automated recording devices deployed for a 77-day period. The current 2013 park boundaries are used as the sampling frames and a suite of permanent spatially-balanced random sampling locations were drawn from a 0.5-ha grid with a Reversed Randomized Quadrant-Recursive Raster (RRQRR) algorithm (Theobald et al. 2007). This temporal design consists of sampling all parks every three years. Data collected under this protocol are stored in the SECN data management system and are available online in the Integration of Resource Management Applications (IRMA) database maintained by the I&M Division national office located in Ft. Collins, Colorado. Data are summarized and a summary report is published for each park each year of sampling. Data are summarized to communicate diversity, composition, and distribution. Synthesis reports, which consist of occupancy models or trend analyses, will be produced approximately once every six years for each park. This document provides a credible and scientifically rigorous strategy for landbird community monitoring with accompanying standard operating procedures (SOPs) that provide systematic instructions on conducting all aspects of the protocol. The SOPs are sufficiently detailed to ensure consistent and comparable data collection across personnel, locations, and over time. This protocol is co-located with the SECN’s Vegetation Community, and Amphibian Community Vital Signs Monitoring protocols.

Protocol for monitoring landbird communities in Southeast Coast Network Parks

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