Development of a Coordinated Bird Monitoring Plan for Canada and the United States

Bart, Jonathon; Ralph, C. John

Bird monitoring is at a crossroads. While monitoring programs have existed in North America for nearly a century, recent political, biological, sociological, and economic changes necessitate a new and more efficient approach. Fortunately we now have tools available to meet the demands, including powerful coalitions of the willing within agencies, organizations, and universities. Further, rapid advances in several areas auger well for the process: specifically advances in monitoring methods, data archiving, and extremely powerful computer tools that allow retrieval and analysis, all have reached unprecedented levels of sophistication. The waterbird, shorebird, and landbird initiatives have all begun work on taxa-specific monitoring programs (e.g., Brown et al. 2001, Donaldson et al. 2001, Kushlan et al. 2002, Rich et al. 2004). Their plans identify species that warrant monitoring, important habitat relationships, declare goals for long-term estimates of trend in population size, and – to varying degrees – describe how the goals can best be achieved. Coordinated Bird Monitoring (CBM) is an attempt by the initiatives, working with many agencies, nongovernment organizations, and individuals, to forge a comprehensive approach to monitoring that will provide information on all nongame birds. Here, we briefly describe the CBM approach, how it can help implement the initiatives' proposals, and suggest which aspects of the general approach should be emphasized during the next several years. This document is part of that USFS GRT.