The Institute for Bird Populations

From arctic Alaska to the northwestern corner of California, we are working with partners including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, the University of Montana, and the Karuk Tribe to provide information that will help land managers better safeguard species of management concern. Here we highlight two of these projects.

We’re using ARUs (Autonomous Recording Units) to monitor Bank Swallows and other songbirds along the Dalton Highway in Alaska.

The swallows like to nest in piles of sand or gravel and exposed banks that are used or excavated for road maintenance projects along the highway. This work will help the BLM protect nesting swallows and inventory other songbird species using the habitat along the most northerly road in the United States.

For over 20 years, we have partnered with the National Park Service’s Inventory and Monitoring Program to survey birds in five national parks in the Pacific Northwest.

Our expertly-trained field crews hike hundreds of miles each year in the backcountry of the parks, performing point count surveys. The data collected helps us understand the habitat needs and population status of dozens of species, and the effects of climate change and other large-scale ecological processes.

We’ve been working in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California since IBP was founded in 1989. Here we summarize just a few of the many projects we're working on in the region today.

As with the parks in the Pacific Northwest, our skilled surveyors perform backcountry point counts to assess the health of bird populations in Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and Devils Postpile National Monument. We operate some of the longest running MAPS bird banding stations in Yosemite National Park. And we're also currently collaborating with Yosemite to study and conserve Spotted and Great Gray Owls in the park.

National Parks are an ideal place to study the effects of long-term processes such as climate change and wildfire, because they are areas where other types of human-caused disturbance are relatively limited. Our latest analyses of these long-term datasets looked at breeding season density for 62 bird species, and the effect of fire history on the density of 42 species. We found that most species were stable or increasing over a period of dry winters and warm springs between 2011 and 2019, and that the majority of species showed positive and lasting responses to fire, especially after high-severity burns. Positive effects of fire on bird population density outnumbered negative effects 7 to 1. These positive effects of fire lasted at least 35 years for eight of the species analyzed: Dusky and Western Flycatchers, Warbling Vireo, Steller's Jay, Mountain Chickadee, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Fox Sparrow and Hermit Warbler.

We also partner with several national forests and other land managers in the Sierra Nevada region to conduct research on bird species of conservation concern like Spotted Owl, American Goshawk, Black-backed Woodpecker, and Willow Flycatcher.

You can read more about two of these projects- our work monitoring the response of birds of prey to forest and fire management efforts, and restoring aspen stands to benefit birds and bees- further on in this report. Our work helps inform land management decisions to aid in the conservation of these species.

In the last few years we've started several new projects to better understand changing ecology and population dynamics of birds in the southwestern US. Here are a couple of highlights.

Since 2022, we have partnered with the National Park Service to conduct annual bird monitoring in six parks and national monuments in the Southern Colorado Plateau Network: Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Bandelier, Canyon de Chelly, Petrified Forest and Wupatki. We are also providing new analyses of historical monitoring data, with a focus on how climate change is affecting bird populations in the parks.

Our most recent study examines the effects of changes in the structure and plant composition of pinyon-juniper woodlands due to drought or thinning treatments (to reduce the severity of wildfires) on the birds that breed there, including pinyon-juniper specialist species such as Juniper Titmouse and Gray Vireo. Most species showed little preference for areas dominated by specific tree or shrub species, and seemed to be resilient to moderate or localized loss of canopy cover, but tree death at landscape scales or intensive thinning led to local losses of species like Black-throated Gray Warbler and Plumbeous Vireo.

We are also working in Death Valley National Park, using ARUs to monitor bird species’ use of remote riparian areas. The project is part of a larger effort to help staff at Death Valley and other parks understand the dynamics and distributions of the avian communities they are managing. The ARUs will monitor bird presence through the breeding season and into the fall to help the park better understand which species are present, and for how long. Some of the species we'll be listening for include Least Bell’s Vireo, Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, and Inyo California Towhee.

In the western Pacific, along the edge of the famous Mariana Trench, is a chain of volcanic islands, including the US territory Guam, and the US Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), which includes the islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. We started working in this region in 2008, monitoring birds on the islands of Saipan and American Samoa.

This year, we established a new TMAPS (Tropical Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship) station on Rota.

Rota is the southernmost island of the CNMI, a tiny island with a rich and varied history spanning thousands of years of human civilization, lush tropical rainforests and coral reefs, and a suite of birds including a unique endemic species found nowhere else in the world, the nosa' luta, or Rota White-eye. The CNMI Department of Fish and Wildlife has asked IBP to monitor the population trends of birds on Rota so that they can be compared with birds on the larger island of Saipan, which shares many of the same species and habitat conditions.

The Department of Defense has set aside vast areas of land to for troop training. The military actively strives to balance the goals of troop readiness with environmental protection. At more than 255 square miles, Fort Liberty in North Carolina is one of the largest military installations in the world.

Since 2009, IBP has partnered with natural resource managers at the base (formerly called Fort Bragg), to monitor birds through MAPS monitoring and, more recently, point-count surveys. The base includes a variety of natural habitats, including some of the largest remnants of the endangered longleaf pine ecosystem, critical habitat for federally threatened Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

The data that IBP collects allows resource managers to track the health of breeding bird populations on the base, and to assess the impacts of Fort Liberty’s frequent prescribed fires, implemented in large part to maintain habitat for Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, on other native bird species across the Base.

IBP’s two long-term demographic monitoring programs are going strong. The Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program, initiated in 1989, completed its 36th season this year. Its southern counterpart in the non-breeding range, the Monitoreo de Sobrevivenica Invernal (MoSI) program, began in 2002 and is entering its 22nd season.

In each program, trained and permitted bird banders collect critical data on each bird’s age, sex, biometrics, and body condition that allow scientists to calculate important demographic measures including reproductive and survival rates.

Over the life of the MAPS program, public agencies, non-governmental groups, and individuals have established and operated more than 1400 stations across the United States and Canada. MAPS banders submit their capture records to the MAPS database. IBP scientists compile and proof these records and make the data available to researchers and land managers.

To date, the MAPS database has almost 2.5 million capture records. In 2023, we launched a new web application called the MAPS Data Explorer that makes it easier for scientists to download the data they need and performs some standard analyses for MAPS operators and others interested in interpreting the data.

Recent analyses of MAPS data have yielded important findings about avian ecology and the effects of climate change, which were published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature Ecology and Evolution, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Long-term and geographically broad biological databases like MAPS are rare but have huge scientific value. You can learn more about how we're working to make the database more accessible in the  New Tools  section above.

MoSI stations are located in Latin America and the Caribbean (with a few stations in the southern U.S.) in the non-breeding range of many Neotropical migratory bird species.

MoSI banders collect almost the same data as MAPS banders, providing critical information on the demographics of migratory and resident species.

Monitoring migratory species, such as the Wood Thrush, on the non-breeding grounds gives conservation biologists a full picture of the threats to these species across their annual cycle.

In addition to providing important data on Neotropical migrant birds, the MoSI program also provides critical information about the health of resident neotropical bird populations.