Regional Landbird Monitoring: Perspectives from the Northern Rocky Mountains
Hutto RL and Young JS. 2002. Regional Landbird Monitoring: Perspectives from the Northern Rocky Mountains. Wildlife Society Bulletin. 30(3):738-750
The Northern Region Landbird Monitoring Program (NRLMP) has been in place for nearly a decade. Based on our experience with this program, we offer thoughts on monitoring goals, the need for regional programs, and the components we believe make count-based monitoring effective. The NRLMP includes a biennial bird survey conducted from permanently marked points for the purposes of long-term population-trend monitoring. Its primary strength, however, emerges from the inclusion of habitat information at each survey point, which allows rapid inference about land-use effects, and from an alternate-year focus on short-term management effects studies. Those who may be planning to initiate a regional monitoring program may want to incorporate some of the perceived strengths of, and methodology associated with, the NRLMP while avoiding some of the pitfalls we have encountered. The power to detect both population trends and management effects might then emerge not only from the efforts of individual, regionally based programs but also from the collective effort of a variety of similarly designed regional programs.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Hutto, Richard; Young, Jock
- Units
- SODN
- Keywords
- Adaptive management, Birds, Conservation, Counts, Forest, habitat relationships, landbird monitoring, Management, scale, Survey Methods