Why are you monitoring?
Clearly defining the purpose of your project is a crucial step.
It determines which different approaches (i.e. what is measured) and methods (i.e. how it is measured) are appropriate.
Different users tend to ask different questions of monitoring, depending on their needs or interests.
Bird monitoring can be broadly driven by simple curiosity or purely scientific or management questions. Determining which of these you are addressing is an important first step:
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Curiosity:
Observers typically focusing on particular species or locations that interest them rather than setting out to address specific questions. Such monitoring can provide unique benefits by, for example, informing natural history, engaging with citizen volunteers, or encouraging scientific literacy, social capital and engagement in broader environmental issues.
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Scientific questions:
Focusing on learning and developing an understanding of the ecology, behaviour and dynamics of a given bird population or community. Such studies are typically conducted to increase fundamental understanding and test specific hypotheses.
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Conservation and management questions are generally for the purpose of:
- Assessing status: identifying whether bird populations or communities are viable.
- Monitoring for trends: focusing on the detection or confirmation of declines or increases.
- Assess management: providing information that is useful in making informed management decisions either of the birds themselves or for bigger-picture environmental goals (i.e. using birds as indicators).
Use evaluation criteria to help clarify your goals
Evaluation criteria are ‘yardsticks’ against which performance is measured. Incorporating evaluation criteria into your monitoring goal helps to make it clear what your project aims to achieve, particularly when addressing conservation and management questions, and to observe whether you are making progress towards them.
Comparisons against such baselines, thresholds or targets can be made in either a static (i.e. distance from thresholds or targets) or dynamic manner (i.e. rates of change towards or away from thresholds or targets).
Alternatively, assessments with respect to previously identified thresholds can combine both static and dynamic variables, such as in ‘alerts’ approaches where sets of quantitative population criteria are used to place species on a ‘red’, ‘amber’ or ‘green’ alert.