Landbird community monitoring at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park: 2012 data summary
Kurimo-Beechuk EA and Byrne M. 2016. Landbird community monitoring at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park: 2012 data summary. Natural Resource Data Series. NPS/SECN/NRDS—2016/1013. National Park Service, Natural Resource Stewardship and Science. Fort Collins, Colorado
Birds are an important component of park ecosystems. Due to their high body temperature, rapid metabolism, and high ecological position in most food webs, birds are also good indicators of the effects of local and regional ecosystem changes. Patterns in the community composition, distribution, and occurrence of breeding birds provide a metric for assessing ecological integrity and sustainability in southeastern U. S. ecosystems. Further, trends in these attributes in relation to activities occurring at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park (e.g., management actions, natural disturbance, invasive-species treatment) will improve our understanding of the effects of various management actions and other stressors on the condition of park resources. This report summarizes data collected during implementation of the SECN landbird community monitoring protocol (Byrne et al. 2014) at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park in 2012. 1. Automated recording devices collected bird detection/ non-detection data from 28 of the 30 spatially balanced random locations within the park. 2. Approximately 1,940 minutes of recordings were collected May–June, to represent a closed population, and were evaluated to detect the presence of vocalizing birds. 3. Fifty-five species of birds were detected during the sampling effort. 4. Monitoring efforts resulted in the addition of three new species to the official species list for the park: bald eagle, Canada goose, and cliff swallow. 5. Northern cardinal, red-eyed vireo, tufted titmouse, northern parula, American crow, Carolina chickadee, and Carolina wren were the most frequently occurring and widely distributed species (i.e., occurring at 80% or more of all sampling locations). Blue-gray gnatcatcher, blue jay, hooded warbler, red-bellied woodpecker, summer tanager, Acadian flycatcher, and great crested flycatcher were also widely distributed across the park, occurring at 70% or more of all sampling locations. 6. The full dataset, and associated metadata, can be acquired from the NPS data store at the Integrated Resource Management Applications portal (https://irma. nps.gov/App/Portal/Home).
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Kurimo-Beechuk, Elizabeth; Byrne, Michael
- Date of Issue
- 2016-03
- Publisher
- National Park Service, Natural Resource Stewardship and Science
- Units
- HOBE , NRSS , SECN
- Keywords
- Birds, Distance estimation, Distribution, landbird monitoring, Monitoring, variable-circular plots