Monitoring the birds of the National Park Service, Northern Colorado Plateau Network (NCPN): 2007 field season report

Giroir, Glenn

This report documents the results of the third year of habitat-based landbird monitoring in the Northern Colorado Plateau Network, which the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory completed in 2007. In 2005, Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory (RMBO) and the National Park Service (NPS), initiated Monitoring Birds of the National Park Service, Northern Colorado Plateau Network (NCPN), using a protocol similar to other RMBO monitoring programs as delineated by Panjabi et al. (2006). This monitoring program continued through 2007. RMBO designed the program to provide statistically rigorous long-term trend data for populations of most diurnal, regularly breeding landbird species in the NCPN. The program provides information needed to effectively manage and conserve bird populations in the NCPN, including the spatial distribution, abundance, and relationship to important habitat characteristics for each species. The program also supports the NCPN’s efforts to develop long-term natural resource monitoring plans for its park units, and contributes to RMBO’s broader landscape-scale breeding bird monitoring program, which currently includes 11 states in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains regions.The program consists of 45 point transects (15 transects each in low-elevation riparian, pinyon-juniper, and sage shrubland habitats) within 11 different parks. Each transect is conducted two times each spring/summer. We use program DISTANCE to generate density estimates using data collected at point count stations. In 2007, we detected a total of 10,576 individual birds of 128 species on point transects. We detected 4,023 individual birds of 92 species in low-elevation riparian habitat, 3,382 individual birds of 90 species in pinyon-juniper habitat, and 3,171 individual birds of 91 species in sage shrubland habitat. In 2007, in a departure from our usual DISTANCE analyses methods, we pooled the 2005-2007 point transect data to determine density estimates for each year. This allowed us to calculate density estimates for some low-density species that did not have large enough sample sizes to calculate density estimates using only the 2007 data. The pooled 2005-2007 data yielded robust density estimates (CV < 50%) for 41 species and moderately robust estimates (CV = 50-75%) for 11 additional species. We should be able to reach our target of detecting a population change of at least 3% within 30 years for these 52 species, which represent 40 percent of all species detected on point transects in the NCPN during 2005-2007 and represent more than 90 percent of all individual birds observed during 2005-2007.

Monitoring the birds of the National Park Service, Northern Colorado Plateau Network (NCPN): 2007 field season report

Series

Collections