Coordinated Bird Monitoring Programs

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.

- Jonathan Bart and C. John Ralph

Coordinated Bird Monitoring Web Page
Coordinated Bird Monitoring Program website
Click image to visit CBM Web Site

The waterbird, shorebird, and landbird initiatives have all begun work on taxa-specific monitoring programs. 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.

This site has:

  • Documents that describe the CBM program.
  • A series of reports for each of the 48 coterminous States
    summarizing information about important aquatic bird areas.
  • State Coordinated Bird Monitoring (CBM) Plans.
Intermountain West Coordinated Bird Monitoring Program Web Page
Intermountain West Coordinated Bird Monitoring Program website
Click image to visit IWCBM Web Site

The Intermountain West Coordinated Bird Monitering Program (IWCBM) is a cooperative effort by numerous organizations to improve the efficiency and utility of bird monitoring in the Intermountain West.

This site is intended primarily to let visitors download documents that describe the IWCBM program. Click here to download an overview of the program, and here for the most recent progress report. The program has four main parts at present:

Visit each of these pages for brief descriptions of the modules and other downloadable reports or visit the Publication and Reports page for a comprehensive list of downloadable reports.

More about bird monitoring....
Showing 10 of 269 ( Show All )
Collapse2000 Annual Report Marbled Murrelet and Landbird Monitoring in Northwestern California and Oregon
Description: This report highlights the methods, accomplishments and other key details used for: Marbled Murrelet Projects in California and Oregon, Landbird Monitoring in Northwestern California and Upper Klamath Basin Bird Monitoring Project Efforts.
Resource Type: Case Studies, Datasets
Resource Format: URL
Publisher: United States Department of Agriculture
Collapse2005 North American Trumpeter Swan Survey Report
Description: The abundance and productivity of North American trumpeter swans (Cygnus buccinator) was assessed during the 2005 trumpeter swan survey, May 2005-January 2006.
Resource Type: Research Reports and Summaries
Resource Format: PDF
Publisher: United States Fish and Wildlife Service
Collapse2008 Citizen Scientist Newsletter (PDF, 16 pp., 1.6 MB)
Description: Newsletter contains: 2008 Birding Boot Camps, Bird banding volunteers needed, Herp monitoring opportunities, Bird education and outreach, Bird survey results, Become a Botanical Guardian.
Resource Type: Announcements and News Articles
Resource Format: PDF
Publisher: Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division
Collapse2009 Scout Arrival Page
Description: Welcome to the Purple Martin Conservation Association's 2009 scout-arrival page. At this site, we collect and disseminate Purple Martin migration reports from all across North America. On the map above you can see (in purple) the migration of the adult (ASY) martins up through the United States and into Canada. In yellow, you can see the migration of the subadult (SY-M) male Purple Martin later on in the season. Clicking on a particular region of the map will take you to a geographic-specific account of the martin migration.
Resource Type: Research Reports and Summaries
Resource Format: URL
Publisher: The Purple Martin Conservation Association:
CollapseAcoustic Monitoring of Night-Migrating Birds: A Progress Report
Description: This paper discusses an emerging methodology that uses electronic technology to monitor vocalizations of night-migrating birds. It is part of the electronic proceedings of the 1995 Partners in Flight (PIF) International Workshop, "Partners in Flight Conservation Plan: Building Consensus for Action."
Resource Type: Proceedings
Resource Format: URL
Publisher: Cornell University Ornithology Lab
CollapseAcoustic Monitoring of Night-Migrating Birds: A Progress Report
Description: This paper discusses an emerging methodology that uses electronic technology to monitor vocalizations of night-migrating birds. On a good migration night in eastern North America, thousands of call notes may be recorded from a single ground-based, audio-recording station, and an array of recording stations across a region may serve as a "recording net" to monitor a broad front of migration. Data from pilot studies in Florida, Texas, New York, and British Columbia illustrate the potential of this technique to gather information that cannot be gathered by more conventional methods, such as mist-netting or diurnal counts. For example, the Texas station detected a major migration of grassland sparrows, and a station in British Columbia detected hundreds of Swainson's Thrushes; both phenomena were not detected with ground monitoring efforts. Night-flight calls of 35 species of migrant landbirds have been identified by spectrographic matching with diurnal calls recorded from known-identity individuals; call types of another 31 species are known, but are not yet distinguishable from other similar calls in several species complexes. Efforts to use signal-processing technology to automate the recording, detection, and identification of night-flight calls are currently under way at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Automated monitoring of night-flight calls will soon provide information on migration routes, timing, and relative migration density for many species of birds. Such information has application for conservation planning and management, as well as for assessing population trends.
Resource Type: Case Studies, Datasets, Management Plans, Internet Map Services, Recommended Practices
Resource Format: URL
Publisher: Cornell University
CollapseAlaska Bird Observatory: Status Review and Conservation Plan for the Rusty Blackbird in Alaska
Description: This document is an extensive overview of the Rusty Blackbird, including natural history, distribution, status, threats, management efforts, and monitoring.
Resource Type: Life Histories and Species Profiles, Management Plans and Reports
Resource Format: PDF
Publisher: Alaska Bird Observatory
CollapseAmerican Woodcock Conservation Plan: A Summary of and Recommendations for Woodcock Conservation in North America
Description: The goal of the Woodcock Conservation Plan is to halt the decline of woodcock populations and to return them to densities which provide adequate opportunity for utilization of the woodcock resource. The Plan contains a summary of population trends, breeding behavior, habitat requirements, limiting factors, and ecology of the American Woodcock. The Plan determines the extent of population loss from the early 1970s, as well as the loss of early succession habitat since that time. Then, authors calculated the acreage of early succession habitat that must be created in each bird conservation region (BCR) and state to return woodcock densities to those observed in the early 1970s.
Resource Type: Management Plans and Reports
Resource Format: PDF
Publisher: Wildlife Management Institute
CollapseAn Adaptive Approach to Habitat Management for Migratory Birds in the Southeastern United States
Description: Case study about the modern tools for habitat management of migratory birds include models describing habitat-population relationships, coupled with remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS). These approaches implicitly assume some degree of underlying understanding about the functioning of bird populations and communities in response to habitat modifications. Author discusses some general principles in modeling, with emphasis on the use of models as tools for generating testable predictions from our provisional understanding. Then described are some approaches for modeling bird-forest habitat relationships, with emphasis on recent mechanistic models based on individual bird behavior. A specific application of modeling in the management of habitats for Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) populations in Georgia, and how a conceptual model of habitat-population dynamics led to a management experiment designed to test underlying hypotheses of the model. Some difficulties in parameterization of spatially explicitly models, and some recent work on statistical models for providing habitat-specific estimates of survival and movement rates. Finally, the argument that scientific management only happens when management is treated as "experimentation" and models and other predictions about management impacts as testable hypotheses. Research and monitoring must be integrated with management to assure that the data gathered are relevant to decision making and used to inform decision makers. An adaptive management (Walters 1986) paradigm provides a unifying framework for accomplishing these goals.
Resource Type: Case Studies, Management Plans
Resource Format: URL
Publisher: Cornell University
CollapseAn Assessment of Information Pertaining to the Status of Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator)
Description: This paper describes Trumpeter Swan populations, assembles monitoring and abundance data, and makes recommendations for next steps. Particular emphasis is paid to the Rocky Mountain Population.
Resource Type: Research Reports and Summaries
Resource Format: PDF
Publisher: United States Fish and Wildlife Service
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