Evaluating Two Monitoring Methods During Autumn Songbird Migration (Poster)

Abstract

Migration is an important part of avian life cycles that is not well understood, particularly in the West. Understanding how factors like climate change and habitat condition are affecting migrating populations is limited by our ability to monitor them. We compared two widely used migration monitoring tools to see if they are comparable for detecting apparent abundance. This study evaluated how standard effort mist-netting detections compared to automated recording unit detections. For the 24 species that were detected by both methods, relative abundance was correlated (r = 0.60; SE 0.17). While there is some ability to estimate apparent abundance based on the correlative nature of one method, the target species or project goal may dictate which monitoring method should be applied. Ideally, combining these methods will provide a better and more complementary representation of trends in migrating songbirds