A habitat-based point-count protocol for terrestrial birds, emphasizing Washington and Oregon.

Abstract

We describe a protocol and provide a summary for point-count monitoring of landbirds that is designed for habitat-based objectives. Presentation is in four steps: preparation and planning, selecting monitoring sites, establishing monitoring stations, and conducting point counts. We describe the basis for doing habitat-based point counts, how they are organized, and how they differ from other approaches using point counts. We discuss links between local scale and larger scale monitoring and methods to evaluate sample size for monitoring. We develop a framework for identifying potential monitoring sites and provide an attribute database to characterize the potential sites, including rules to select sites. We describe buffer requirements for sites, rules for distances between points, ways to mark individual count stations, and alternative methods for riparian areas. We conclude with guidelines for counting birds and recording data.Keywords: Bird sampling, avifauna, monitoring, point count, Pacific Northwest, bird protocol, avian field methods, population trends, bird detections.This paper gives the rationale and a protocol for habitat-based bird monitoring using point counts. This protocol was developed through collaboration between the Pacific Northwest Research Station and Washington-Oregon Partners in Flight to study population trends and bird-habitat relations in these states.Point-count monitoring is a common way to monitor bird populations. It is characterized by tallying all birds observed at a fixed location during specific, repeated observation periods. It provides the relative abundance of all bird species and, over time, can detect trends in the abundance with a relatively small amount of work compared to other methods. Consistency with established monitoring protocols is essential for local-scale point-count monitoring, because small efforts are unlikely to have sufficient sample sizes to perform one of the key functions of monitoring: detecting changes in bird abundance. Such work can be meaningful when pooled with a larger body of compatible data.Two general approaches have been used in broad-scale point-count monitoring.The widely used population-based method disperses point-count stations at random across a geographic area or along roadways, usually without specific consideration for habitat at each point. The results represent the geographic area, but without additional design considerations they do not distinctly represent any specific habitat type.In contrast, the habitat-based approach stratifies points by habitat. The geographical extent of such monitoring can be large, as similar habitats can be separated by great distances. The results apply clearly, but also exclusively, to the habitats selected. For the purpose of associating bird species with habitat characteristics, SummaryBackground

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