Top: Michelle Stantial (left) and Alison Kocek (right) set up mist nets. Center: An American goldfinch at the Baltimore Woods MAPS station. Bottom: Alison Kocek talks about bird banding with visitors, as Dr. Cohen looks on. The Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship (MAPS) program has been tracking continental trends in bird populations since 1989. Run by the Institute for Bird Populations, MAPS consists of a network of banding stations throughout the U.S. and Canada. Data collected from MAPS stations are crucial for understanding how habitat loss, climate change, and other large-scale factors affect the abundance and distribution of birds, and are used to inform policy and conservation actions. Onondaga Audubon Society (OAS) and SUNY-ESF's Department of Environmental and Forest Biology (EFB) have jointly re-established a MAPS station at Baltimore Woods Nature Center in Marcellus, NY that has been inactive since the early 1990's.
The effort has been led by OAS President Alison Kocek and OAS Board Member Michelle Stantial, both of whom are Ph.D. candidates in the Cohen lab. On weekends throughout the summer, Alison and Michelle, with a team of volunteers that includes Dr. Cohen, work from sunrise to noon banding and taking measurements on birds at the Nature Center. They will report their data to MAPS, where it will be incorporated into statistical models of survival and reproductive success. In this way, we hope to understand how bird populations at Baltimore woods will change over time, and to contribute to scientists' understanding of how we might reverse declines that are currently observed for many of our avian species across North America.
The effort has been led by OAS President Alison Kocek and OAS Board Member Michelle Stantial, both of whom are Ph.D. candidates in the Cohen lab. On weekends throughout the summer, Alison and Michelle, with a team of volunteers that includes Dr. Cohen, work from sunrise to noon banding and taking measurements on birds at the Nature Center. They will report their data to MAPS, where it will be incorporated into statistical models of survival and reproductive success. In this way, we hope to understand how bird populations at Baltimore woods will change over time, and to contribute to scientists' understanding of how we might reverse declines that are currently observed for many of our avian species across North America.
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