Point count offsets for estimating population sizes of north American landbirds

Bird monitoring in North America over several decades has generated many open databases, housing millions of structured and semi‐structured bird observations. These provide the opportunity to estimate bird densities and population sizes, once variation in factors such as underlying field methods, ti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIbis (London, England) Vol. 165; no. 2; pp. 482 - 503
Main Authors Edwards, Brandon P. M., Smith, Adam C., Docherty, Teegan D. S., Gahbauer, Marcel A., Gillespie, Caitlyn R., Grinde, Alexis R., Harmer, Taylor, Iles, David T., Matsuoka, Steven M., Michel, Nicole L., Murray, Andrew, Niemi, Gerald J., Pasher, Jon, Pavlacky, David C., Robinson, Barry G., Ryder, Thomas B., Sólymos, Péter, Stralberg, Diana, Zlonis, Edmund J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.04.2023
Subjects
availability
Birds
data integration
Data points
detectability
distance sampling
Land cover
Methods
Offsets
perceptibility
Population statistics
Probability theory
QPAD
removal sampling
roadside effects
sound attenuation
North America
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Summary:Bird monitoring in North America over several decades has generated many open databases, housing millions of structured and semi‐structured bird observations. These provide the opportunity to estimate bird densities and population sizes, once variation in factors such as underlying field methods, timing, land cover, proximity to roads, and uneven spatial coverage are accounted for. To facilitate integration across databases, we introduce NA‐POPS: Point Count Offsets for Population Sizes of North American Landbirds. NA‐POPS is a large‐scale, multi‐agency project providing an open‐source database of detectability functions for all North American landbirds. These detectability functions allow the integration of data from across disparate survey methods using the QPAD approach, which considers the probability of detection (q) and availability (p) of birds in relation to area (a) and density (d). To date, NA‐POPS has compiled over 7.1 million data points spanning 292 projects from across North America, and produced detectability functions for 338 landbird species. Here, we describe the methods used to curate these data and generate these detectability functions, as well as the open‐access nature of the resulting database.
ISSN:0019-1019
1474-919X
DOI:10.1111/ibi.13169