Forest Interior Bird Survey

The Forest Bird Monitoring Program (FBMP) has been conducted annually in Ontario since 1987, by Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Service (Ontario Region).Each year, between 50 and 150 sites are surveyed by volunteers, who make two 10-minute visits to five point count stations per site. Although the FBMP primarily targets 52 species, it yields data on occurrence and relative abundance for more than 100 species on those sites. The program was designed to investigate spatial and temporal patterns in mature forest-related birds, with monitoring sites selected in off-road locations in core areas of large, mature forests that are protected from active forest management. Thus the FBMP can supplement other avian monitoring programs by providing information on the state of birds associated with mature forest, where habitat conditions are relatively constant. Habitat change is accounted for through accompanying surveys of habitat structure and composition. The program's design facilitates investigations such as: species-habitat associations, species-landscape patterns (e.g., forest fragmentation, spatial scale in avian community assemblage, spatial autocorrelation in sampling design), comparing population trajectories with those from other avian monitoring programs, and others, especially where the species of interest are those associated with forest interior habitat.Data were summarized as follows: for each year, maximum count values of each species from the two visits were summed across the number of stations located within each 10km square. The number of stations varies among squares, and the count of these stations is provided to accompany the bird count values.