Pacific Northwest MAPS spatial demographic coverages -yellow warbler

The Institute for Bird Populations (IBP) coordinates the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) Program to assess and monitor the vital rates and population dynamics of North American landbirds. The MAPS Program utilizes a standardized constant-effort mist netting and banding protocol (DeSante et al. 2010) at a continent-wide network of monitoring stations. Each summer dedicated volunteers operate bird-banding stations to collect data on individual "birds-in-the-hand" representing over 200 species. Analyses of MAPS data provide critical information relating to the ecology, conservation, and management of North American landbird populations and the factors responsible for changes in their populations.

Since 1989 The Institute for Bird Populations has operated MAPS monitoring stations on multiple federal lands and used the data to develop landbird management models and guidelines, and assess the influence of weather and climate on bird populations. Federal funding has also led to the development of software written in MatLab (Mathworks Inc.) to visualize long-term MAPS data and produce species-specific tabulated population parameters that reflect i) temporal patterns (year-specific) that can be linked to annual/seasonal covariates (e.g. annual summer precipitation), and ii) spatial variation (MAPS station-specific) that can be linked to spatially-explicit covariates (e.g. spatial statistics from GIS analyses).