Progress toward developing field protocols for a North American marsh bird monitoring program
This article is part of a larger document. View the larger document here.Abstract
Populations of many marsh-dependent birds appear to be declining, but we currently lack a continental program that provides estimates of population trends for most secretive marshbirds. The survey protocol outlined here is a standardized survey methodology being used on a pilot basis at National Wildlife Refuges and other protected wetland areas across North America and will ultimately be refined and proposed for use in a continental marshbird monitoring program. These protocols: (1) provide flexibility so that data from ongoing local and regional monitoring efforts may be pooled to the extent possible, (2) summarize the full description of proposed survey protocols contained in Conway (2003), and (3) include details on, and rationale for, point spacing, survey duration, seasonal and daily survey windows, and structure of call-broadcast sequences. Attempts to validate abundance indices based on call-broadcast surveys for primary marshbird species will be included in the survey effort by incorporating three methods for estimating different components of detection probability into the field protocols. Implementation of these protocols at a continental scale awaits delineation of a sampling frame and will occur after several years of field testing and review/revision of these draft field protocols. Field testing is currently being conducted at ~80 National Wildlife Refuges in a variety of freshwater and saltwater marshlands distributed across North America.