Alaska Landbird Monitoring Survey Dataset

Boreal Partners in Flight developed the Alaska Landbird Monitoring Survey (ALMS) primarily to monitor breeding populations of landbirds in the vast off-road areas of Alaska in conjunction with data collected from the roadside North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). ALMS is a collaborative program in which agencies and other entities conduct standardized surveys of breeding birds and their habitats on the lands they manage and then provide the data to the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center for analysis and archiving. The ALMS monitoring program comprises a set of survey blocks that have been selected in a stratified-random design primarily across state and Federal natural resource lands in Alaska with the principal goal of assessing regional and statewide population trends of birds during the breeding season (Handel and Sauer 2017). Each block has a mini-grid of 15−25 points that are typically surveyed biennially, with half of the blocks surveyed in alternating years. This sampling frame has been augmented with a set of 34 transects or mini-grids, each comprising 12‒28 points, that had previously been established for monitoring on some of these public resource lands and that were suitable for including in the sampling frame for trend estimates. This dataset has been further augmented with data from other non-random locations within Alaska that were collected following the same survey protocol but used for other purposes, such as inventories and specialized studies. At each point within all sampling units, a 10-min point count is conducted by a highly skilled observer, who identifies and records all birds detected. The distance from the observer to the bird and the time at which each bird is observed are recorded in prescribed distance and time intervals for each observation so that densities can be estimated by correcting for detection probability. Observers collect corresponding habitat data during the first visit and at subsequent 10-year intervals or whenever a disturbance (e.g., fire, wind) has caused a significant change. Habitat data will be available in a separate USGS data release.