Wetland Surveys  

Wetlands have been under assault since the settlement of the United States. They have been drained, paved over and transformed into agricultural fields. Thoroughly inventorying our wetland birds will allow us to better track changes in future atlas efforts. The National Wetland Inventory (NWI) recently completed its survey of Pennsylvania, providing a complete statewide indexed map of Pennsylvania's wetlands. For our purposes we are interested in surveying emergent wetlands greater than 0.5 hectares. Subsequently, we have created maps (available soon) of emergent wetlands categorized by size (0.5 - 3 ha., 3 -10 ha. and > 10 ha.). We hope to survey as many wetlands as possible in the next five years, using these maps to locate the wetlands and tape playbacks to locate the birds to help draw a more accurate picture of the current distribution, diversity and prevalence of our wetland birds. The data forms, protocol and CDs will be available for the 2005 field season.

Marshbird Protocol now available. Click the image on the left to open the 24-page booklet (3.1 Mb PDF) in a new window.

PDF files require Acrobat Reader. If you do not have Acrobat Reader, click here for the free download.