Landbirds
Handbook of Field Methods for Monitoring Landbirds
This handbook is a compilation of methods that can be used to assay population size, demographics, and status of many species of birds occurring in a wide variety of habitats. The handbook will prove useful to field biologists, managers, and scientists anywhere in the New World from the arctic through the tropics.
NPS Bird Monitoring Protocols by KBO
These are landbird field monitoring protocols developed by Klamath Bird Observatory for the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Klamath Network.
A Field Guide to Southeast Bird Monitoring Protocols and Programs
This guide is targeted at researchers, land managers, and biologists in the southeast bird conservation community and beyond. The main objective of the guide is to serve as a starting point when considering a monitoring program by summarizing many of the protocols that are available. It is not intended to be a detailed and comprehensive guide, but rather provides one-page introductions to a variety of popular, multi-species bird monitoring programs and protocols that are currently used, or could be used, within the Southeast Partners in Flight region. Each non-technical summary provides a short overview of each method, highlights of its strengths and weaknesses, examples of how each method is being used in bird conservation, and links to web pages where more detailed information can be found.
Bird Conservancy of the Rockies-endorsed Protocols and Datasheets
The Rocky Mountain Avian Data Center supplies researchers and resource professionals with links to methodology and datasheets used to study a wide variety of birds and their habitats at different times of the year. The data center also provide citations to influential published papers regarding avian ecology and conservation, monitoring, sampling techniques, decision support tools/management and statistical analysis that may be helpful. You can find and download Bird Conservancy of the Rockies (BCOR)-endorsed protocols and datasheets on this webpage to assist you in data collection for your research or management project.
Waterbirds
This Protocol instructs surveyors to conduct an initial 5-minute passive point-count survey followed by a series of 1-minute segments during which marsh bird calls are broadcast into the marsh following a standardized approach. Surveyors are instructed to record each individual bird from the suite of 26 focal species that are present in their local area on separate lines of a datasheet and estimate the distance to each bird. Also, surveyors are required to record whether each individual bird was detected within each 1-minute sub-segment of the survey. These data allow analysts to use several different approaches for estimating detection probability.
This protocol framework provides guidance for conducting inventories or monitoring surveys of waterbird habitat conditions and use at local scale in a way that will allow analysis of multiple sites from multiple regions in the Refuge System. This protocol provides a framework for rapidly assessing local habitat conditions and quantifying use of wetlands by waterfowl, shorebirds, and wading birds (hereafter referred to as waterbirds) during non-breeding periods. Also see the IWMM Monitoring Manual.