Birds of New York State
Table of Contents
	Conservation	References

Research Needs

Population and habitat monitoring remains a significant need for conservation of New York's bird resources. The procedures of the North American Breeding Bird Survey have withstood the tests of time and professional scrutiny and emerged as the best source of breeding bird population trends available today (O'Connor et al 2000), but volunteers are still needed to assure that all BBS routes in New York are covered each summer. Information for all of New York State about relative abundances for the breeding bird species that are detectable using roadside count methods already exists and can be obtained easily on-line from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) database analysis website. Population trend information for those species detected by the BBS methodology are also easily available for New York, and can be calculated interactively, "on the fly," from the BBS analysis website for any breeding bird species detected frequently enough in New York to allow calculation of trend estimates. Unfortunately, BBS methods do not detect all 240+ breeding bird species in New York with sufficient frequency to allow statistically credible estimates of relative abundance or population trends. Approximately half the breeding bird species of New York are currently monitored adequately enough by BBS methods to provide estimates of relative abundances and population trends (Smith 1998). Relatively rare, wide-ranging species, like hawks and owls; cryptic species, like rails and some waterfowl; habitat specialists like Cerulean Warbler (Dendroica cerulea); and numerically rare, sparsely distributed species, like Henslow's Sparrow (Ammodramus henslowii), may not be sampled adequately by roadside counts. Additional cost-effective, statistically sound inventory and counting methods for rare species need to be developed and field tested.

Increasingly, however, we need more detailed information about the basic ecology, population biology, distributions, and natural history of breeding bird species. We lack detailed, up-to-date inventories of birds for most of the public lands of the state; federal wildlife refuges, like Iroquois and Montezuma, managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service, and Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, managed by the National Park Service, are notable exceptions. Unfortunately, a project to develop check lists for the birds of New York's state parks was abandoned after only 13 check lists were produced (Smith 1998). Carefully collected and spatially referenced information linking occurrences of bird species unambiguously to the habitats they require for survival and reproduction is desperately needed if we are to refine our understanding of long-term changes in habitat patterns and habitat fragmentation. Habitat-specific relative abundances, breeding densities, and breeding productivity estimates are not available for most of the breeding bird species of New York. Professional ecologists, ornithologists, and resource managers need to become familiar with and apply nationally recognized and accepted standards for classifying habitats, such as those embodied in the National Vegetation Classification System (Smith and Gregory 1998; http://www.natureserve.org/publications/icec/index.html; http://biology.usgs.gov/fgdc.veg/standards/vegstd.htm), so that ambiguity and imprecision in describing and defining habitats can be reduced.

It is becoming obvious to conservationists that successful conservation of birds and other highly mobile species will require a long-term commitment to managing habitats of sufficient quality and quantity to maintain viable, sustainable populations of all species within healthy, functional ecosystems. In addition to habitats for breeding, habitats used for stopover during migration, especially in landscapes developed extensively by humans, must be maintained and better understood through monitoring and research. The real magnitude of migratory bird movements throughout New York in both spring and fall is not consistently documented, and the stopover ecology (cf. Morris et al. 1994), habitat requirements, and patterns of habitat use by migratory species in New York has received little systematic attention.

While the more than 30 years since passage of the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1966 have seen conservation efforts focused at the species and population levels, we now know that such a "fine-filter" approach has to be complemented by a "coarse filter" aimed at conserving intact, functional biological communities and all the species they contain (Hunter 1990, Smith 1998). If they are to succeed, our conservation activities will also need sound conceptual and philosophical foundations. Science-based conservation (Mills et al. 2001) and ecosystem-based approaches to adaptive resource management (Christensen et al. 1996, Grumbine 1994), if embraced thoughtfully, offer promising paradigms for bird conservation in the twenty-first century.

This web site was developed by the New York State Biodiversity Project
and is maintained by the New York State Biodiversity Research Institute