Sagehen Creek Field Station

23 May, 04 AM - 25 May, 05 AM

My team and I have collected over 10 years of monitoring information on bird populations from montane riparian and wet meadow habitats in the Sagehen Basin and elsewhere on the Tahoe National Forest, including species diversity and relative abundance, habitat data, and survivorship and productivity obtained through banding birds at constant-effort mist-netting stations using the MAPS protocol (Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship; Ralph et al. 1993; DeSante et al. 2005). Demographic data on survivorship and productivity reveal not only whether species are present, but also whether they are surviving and reproducing and ultimately whether their populations are viable. At Sagehen Creek, we began banding neotropical migrants in 1991 and monitoring has continued at one to three MAPS stations every year since. Each MAPS station consists of ten 12m mist-nets in a 20 ha array which are sampled for 6 hours beginning at dawn once during each of 10 ten-day periods from 1 May to 8 August (DeSante et al. 2005). These data provide a unique baseline on bird populations and community dynamics in ungrazed montane riparian and wet meadow habitats which may be compared with other meadows with different management, condition and trend. The Sagehen MAPS stations have helped verify species survivorship patterns, years of high productivity, and previously unknown upslope migration and use of Sierra meadows by foothill breeding neotropical migrants (Reynolds ? USFS-PIF reports to Tahoe NF).

Visit #12747 @Sagehen Creek Field Station

Approved

Under Project # 8403 | Research

Long-term Monitoring of Avian Demography in Sierra Meadows

professional - The Nature Conservancy

Reservation Members(s)

Group of 4 Volunteer May 23 - 25, 2007 (3 days)

Reserve Resources(s) | Create Invoice

East Cabin (Lower Camp) 4 May 23 - 25, 2007