Bird community monitoring for Bandelier National Monument: 2015 summary report
Holmes JA and Johnson MJ. Bird community monitoring for Bandelier National Monument: 2015 summary report. Natural Resource Data Series. NPS/SCPN/NRDS—2016/1068. National Park Service. Fort Collins, Colorado
The National Park Service (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring Program was designed to determine the current status and monitor long-term trends in the condition of park natural resources, providing park managers with a strong scientific foundation for making decisions and working with other agencies and the public for the pro-tection of park ecosystems. The Southern Colorado Plateau Network (SCPN) of the NPS has identified bird communities as a vital sign for network parks (Thomas et al. 2006). The goal of bird community monitoring is to provide status and trends data on bird communities in several predominant habitats where integrated upland or riparian vegetation monitoring is also occurring. For Bandelier National Monument (BAND), Southern Colorado Plateau Network (SCPN) and monument staff selected the Mixed Conifer ecological site as an important ecosystem for vegetation and bird community monitoring. At the initiation of bird monitoring in 2008, this ecological site represented large areas of the monu-ment. Then, in June, 2011, the Las Conchas Fire burned over 156,000 acres of the monument. All of the major watersheds within the monument were heavily impacted, and much of the mixed conifer forest was burned. This large-scale disturbance resulted in long-lasting changes in forest structure and composition. Continued monitor-ing of the mixed conifer bird community required that we modify the original sampling frame. We assessed burn severity for each of the original 100 monitoring plots and identified 48 plots with no evidence of fire or with low canopy burn severity, exhibiting little to no changes in vegetation structure. These plots now comprise the BAND mixed conifer sampling frame for bird community monitoring. In 2015, through a Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit agreement with SCPN, we continued monitoring the upland bird community of the target mixed conifer habitat in BAND, which had been initiated in 2008, and continued in 2009 and 2012. In this report, we document monitoring activities of the 2015 field season and summarize the data that were collected.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Holmes, Jennifer; Johnson, Matthew
- Publisher
- National Park Service
- Units
- BAND , NRSS , SCPN
- Keywords
- bird communities, bird habitat data, mixed conifer, pinyon-juniper, variable circular plot counts
- Subjects
- Ecological Framework: Biological Integrity | Focal Species or Communities | Birds