MEDN Landbird Monitoring

Little, Annie; Hall, Linnea; Khasla, Sangeet

doi:10.57830/2312628

Landbirds were selected in the late 1980s as one of the “vital signs” for monitoring the ecological condition or “health” of Channel Island National Park (Davis 1989, Fancy et al. 2009) because they are a conspicuous and important component of the island ecosystems, and are good indicators of changes in the biotic or abiotic components of the environment upon which they depend (Canterbury et al. 2000, Bryce et al. 2002). There is a keen public interest in birds, and birdwatching is a popular recreational pastime that forms the basis for a large and sustainable industry (Sekercioglu 2002). Moreover, numerous species of landbirds can be efficiently surveyed using one basic methodology, and baseline datasets exist for mainland California and throughout the United States to provide context for interpreting the results of the park’s monitoring results (Bibby et al. 2000, Buckland et al. 2001). Key management question addressed by monitoring of landbirds is how populations are responding to changes in vegetation related to historical land use practices and other environmental factors. Landbird populations continue to be influenced by the impacts of intensive land management practices of the past, before CHIS became a national park, such as grazing and agriculture, and by habitat changes since removing non-native ungulates from the islands. Park: CHIS (note: SAMO has a park-funded landbird monitoring program that uses similar methods and the same cooperator) Protocol Objectives: 1) Determine long-term trends in species composition, distribution, and abundance of native and nonnative landbird species in selected areas of Channel Islands National Park. 2) Improve our understanding of breeding bird–habitat relationships and the effects of management actions such as alien plant and animal control on bird populations by correlating changes in landbird species composition, distribution, and abundance with changes in specific habitat variables.

MEDN Landbird Monitoring

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