The Lab's Birds in Forested Landscapes project (BFL) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are developing a new partnership to further our understanding of human-caused stressors on bird populations. The partnership is part of BFL's expanding focus, which now includes studying the impacts of human disturbance and pollution on forest-breeding birds in addition to the habitat fragmentation studies that have continued since the project's inception.

BFL is studying the impact of habitat fragmentation and acid rain on thrushes, a case with strong parallels to a study of the effects of mercury biomagnification and human disturbance on Common Loons, conducted by the EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL). BFL citizen-science participants have gathered data from more than 3,000 study sites in the United States and Canada on breeding bird species, habitat, predators, and nest parasites. These data are particularly powerful when they can be accessed and combined with environmental data from other sources. For example, Lab scientists are combining the extensive information from BFL with data on soil properties and estimates of the amount of acid rain received by each study site, in the effort to understand impacts of fragmentation and acid rain on thrushes in parts of the eastern United States.

In ongoing studies of how bird populations are affected by human-caused stressors, the Lab offers its long expertise in bird conservation research and in conducting studies across wide geographic regions using citizen-science data. Meanwhile, NHEERL brings extensive knowledge of the biology of human-caused contamination of the natural world and experience in making large environmental data sets accessible on the Internet. See for a more detailed article on the partnership and NHEERL. For a printed copy, call us or send your name, address, and request to the Communications and Outreach program.