Landbird Monitoring Protocol: Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Network
Gostomski T, Knutson M, Danz NP, Route B, Sutherland TW. 2010. Landbird Monitoring Protocol: Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Network
The Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Program worked with the nine national park units in the Great Lakes Network to identify indicators (called Vital Signs) important to protecting the most important natural resources in the region. Landbird Communities is one of the Vital Signs that ranked highly for the nine parks. Landbird monitoring is used by many land management agencies and organizations because of its relatively easy implementation and low cost. The Great Lakes I&M Program worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Regions 3 and 5; the Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota Duluth; the Cofrin Center for Biological Diversity at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay; and the Northeast Temperate Network to develop this standardized protocol that we hope will facilitate data comparisons across a broad swath of the northern United States. More locally, this protocol was developed to standardize data collection across the nine parks of the Great Lakes Network (GLKN), many of whom have been collecting such data for more than ten years. This standardized protocol, implemented across the Great Lakes Network parks, will allow for regional comparisons while still giving parks the freedom to analyze and identify trends within their boundaries.