6. Section Overview—Population and Habitat Assessment
Using Volunteers
Rick Bonney
Greg Butcher
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 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 Wildlife 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.
In: Bonney, Rick; Pashley, David N.; Cooper, Robert J.; Niles, Larry,
eds. 2000. Strategies for bird conservation: The Partners in Flight planning process; Proceedings of the 3rd Partners in Flight Workshop; 1995
October 1-5; Cape May, NJ. Proceedings RMRS-P-16. Ogden, UT: U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research
Station.
Rick Bonney, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods
Road, Ithaca, NY 14850. Greg Butcher, Birder’s World, P.O. Box 1612,
Waukesha, WI 53187.
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-16. 2000
235