Can decreasing population trends be linked to land management practices?
The design of the BBS monitoring system makes correlating population trends with land management practices virtually impossible. Point count transects that are 34.9 km long generally pass through lands that include widely differing habitat types, let alone management regimes. Once data from the various points along each transect are combined (which is necessary to amass an adequate sample size for trend detection), adequate resolution for correlating abundance data with land management practices (or even habitat types) is necessarily lost. Standardized, constant-effort mist-netting data from the MAPS program may provide bird population indices for more circumscribed areas than BBS routes, and therefore provide the potential for linking specific land management regimes to their consequences for local bird populations. Additionally, MAPS data provide information on primary demographic parameters, so that observed population changes can be attributed to changes in either productivity, sur
