Riparian landbird monitoring protocol for Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore: Version 4.6 – 2019 revision

Gardali, Thomas; Humple, Diana; Dettling, Mark; Herzog, Mark; Koenen, Marcus; Press, David; Merkle, William; Allen, Sarah

This document describes a monitoring program for riparian landbirds in two National Park Service units of the San Francisco Bay Area Network (SFAN) in central-coastal California. The purpose of the monitoring program is to detect population trends and underlying demographic rates (productivity and survival) in order to provide information essential to managing network resources. This monitoring plan provides background on past landbird monitoring in the parks, lists measurable objectives for the monitoring program, and summarizes the monitoring scheme, field methods, and data management and analysis. Landbirds are herein defined as passerine (songbirds) and near-passerine (e.g., woodpeckers, hummingbirds) species. The two largest SFAN parks are included in this monitoring plan: Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GOGA) and Point Reyes National Seashore (PORE). A single focal habitat, riparian, is targeted for monitoring due to its importance to landbirds, ecosystem function, and prevalence in the parks. The diversity and abundance of landbirds in central-coastal California is extraordinary. The PORE bird list alone includes nearly 490 species (Stallcup 2000). Many of these species nest in the region, are year-round or winter residents, or are regular migrants through the area. The region has a long history of ornithological research and monitoring because of this diversity. Recently, the National Inventory and Monitoring Program funded an inventory of landbirds at the San Francisco Bay Area Network of parks between 1998 and 2002 (Flannery et al. 2001, Hammond and Geupel 2001, Haff et al. 2003). In addition to conducting these inventories, Point Blue Conservation Science (hereafter Point Blue; formerly PRBO Conservation Science) has been conducting landbird monitoring in the region since 1965, when the organization was founded and work began at PORE (see Ballard et al. 2003, Howell and Gardali 2003). Monitoring has been done continually at Point Blue’s Palomarin Field Station since 1966, and the program helped give birth to such nationally standardized programs as Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS, DeSante et al. 2000) and the Breeding Biology and Research Database (BBIRD, Martin and Geupel 1993, Martin et al. 1997). Point Blue has also been conducting annual, standardized point count surveys, nest searching, and constant effort mist-netting at select locations within PORE and GOGA for nearly over a decade (Holmes et al. 1998, Scoggin et al. 2000, Gardali et al. 2003a, Gardali et al. 2003b, Michaud et al. 2004, Samuels et al. 2005). Point Blue continues to do intensive long-term monitoring in PORE that is outside of the scope of this monitoring plan (e.g., at the Palomarin Field Station) but that can be used in conjunction with the data collected as part of the National Park Service vital signs monitoring program. The relationship between the National Park Service and Point Blue serves as a model partnership that deserves the continued long-term commitment of both entities. Specific objectives of the long-term monitoring program of landbirds are to: 1. Determine population trends for as many landbird species as possible in riparian habitat during the breeding, fall migration, and winter seasons. 2. Estimate reproductive success and annual survival for as many landbird species as possible in riparian habitat. Coordination outside of the network is necessary to interpret results produced locally and, importantly, to protect these species because their movements during migration, foraging, and molting can sometimes range outside park boundaries. Point Blue protocols can be integrated with other resource agencies for compatible population analysis. The SFAN monitoring program contributes to California State and U.S. National efforts to assess landbird population status and trends. Point Blue contributes landbird data to MAPS, BBIRD, The Bird Banding Lab (USGS, BBL, Patuxent, MD), California Partners in Flight (

Riparian landbird monitoring protocol for Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore: Version 4.6 – 2019 revision

Series

Other versions

Collections