The challenges of standardizing colonial waterbird survey protocols - what is working? What is not?

Our ability to manage and conserve colonial waterbird species throughout Mexico, Meso-America, Canada, the Caribbean nations, and the United States is presently hampered by a lack of reliable information on the status and trends of their populations, information that can only be obtained by collecting comparable data using standardized data collection techniques that estimate bias. The U.S. Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center is working in concert with the North American Waterbird Monitoring Partnership (Kushlan et al. 2002) to coordinate waterbird monitoring efforts and to develop an agreed-upon set of survey methods that incorporate bias estimation. To determine the practicality of implementing methods that require measures of detection probability and to test the error associated with specific survey methods prior to their adoption as standards, several tests have been conducted the field.