Individual Highlight
Bird Monitoring in the Western Great Lakes National Forests Shows Stabilized Breeding Bird Populations
Summary
Systematic annual and habitat-specific surveys of breeding birds were conducted by Forest Service scientists and their university partners in the Chequamegon-Nicolet, Chippewa, and Superior National Forests over the last two decades. They studied population trends from 1995 to 2011 for 97 species of forest birds. Their results suggest that, overall, breeding bird populations of many species were stable or increasing over the past 17 years, which is a positive reflection of forest condition within these national forests. Only a few species showed a declining trend over this recent time period. Results illustrate the relative importance of habitat, climate, geography, and human development as drivers of bird species distributions in the study area. Their data on trends from the past two decades suggest that populations of forest breeding bird populations within these four national forests of the region have stabilized, a result with important implications about the regional health of forest communities in this hotspot of avian diversity.
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