| Population and Habitat
Assessment Using Volunteers INTRODUCTION Rick Bonney1 and Greg Butcher2 The history of North American ornithology is replete with the contributions of volunteers, and the tradition of volunteer involvement in ornithological field work continues to grow and flourish today. Indeed, much of the information required to develop conservation plans for migratory birds—for example, large-scale surveys of bird populations in varied habitats—is best collected by armies of volunteer field biologists. This section is intended to illustrate the range and variety of projects in which volunteers can play a major effort. First, Kris Agard West describes the Lake Ontario Migratory Songbird Study, conducted over 375 miles of shoreline by The Nature Conservancy and the New York Natural Heritage Program. Agard discusses practices used to recruit, train, and manage volunteers. In the following paper, Ken Burton and David DeSante describe the behind-the-scenes effort to operate the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program, a continentwide, standardized monitoring program that uses mark-recapture data gathered at a network of constant-effort banding stations. An estimated 64% of the effort expended in running MAPS stations is contributed by volunteers. Next, Eric Nelson and Carol Damberg show how volunteer birders were trained to conduct point counts on the Upper Mississippi River National Widlife Refuge. With only two staff qualified to conduct point counts, volunteers are essential to monitoring birds on this area, the longest national wildlife refuge in the United States. In the next paper, Linda Siebert shows how the Bureau of Land Management encourages home-grown efforts to recruit volunteers for a variety of educational and conservation efforts in the small town of Moab, Utah. In the final paper, Judi Falk describes a semester-long university course titled “Techniques for Monitoring Songbirds,” developed by the Tongass National Forest and the University of Alaska as a training program for volunteers who go on to monitor birds in Juneau or other parts of the United States. 1 Cornell
Laboratory of Ornithology 2 Birder's World |