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especially in the years immediately following
habitat manipulations, may not ensure
successful breeding, or that a breeding
population of Golden-winged Warbler is
established. Tracking the population-level
Population Response by Golden-winged Warbler
Continued monitoring of Golden-winged Warbler
populations is critical to: 1) track rangewide
trends in the context of meeting population goals
and understanding the pace and status of overall
population recovery, and 2) measure local
response to habitat establishment and
manipulation, helping to determine if newly
created habitats are being occupied and if
reproductive performance is adequate to create
source populations. Monitoring must inform
knowledge of population dynamics and
management decisions at all relevant scales –
rangewide, regional, focal area, and local
management sites. The population sampling that
occurs at these different scales should be
hierarchical and coordinated in such a way as to
produce outputs that are comparable across
spatial scales. We recommend using protocols
(see Appendix G) established under the Goldenwinged
Warbler Conservation Initiative to
measure local response of Golden-winged
Warbler to habitat manipulations, and then
relate these to regional and rangewide
population goals established under the Goldenwinged
Warbler Conservation Plan and the ESH
Business Plan developed for the National Fish and
Wildlife Foundation.
The patchy nature of present-day Golden-winged
Warbler distribution prevents effective surveying
with traditional methods, such as the North
American BBS. This makes estimates of regional
population size and trend difficult. At present,
BBS data give us a general measure of long-term
trends over the entire range, but low detection
rates, especially in the Appalachian Region (BCR
28), preclude estimation of trends over smaller
areas (regions/states/provinces) and potentially
erodes confidence in rangewide trends. To
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response to habitat change, including fecundity
and genetic purity of newly established Goldenwinged
Warbler populations, is essential for
meeting the population goals in this
conservation plan.
overcome these problems, the Golden-winged
Warbler Working Group developed and tested a
spatially balanced sampling methodology (see
Appendix F) aimed at establishing a monitoring
strategy that is effective for patchily distributed
species, but not overly cumbersome or costly to
implement.
Under the NFWF-funded Golden-winged Warbler
Conservation Initiative, this spatially balanced
monitoring design was pilot-tested in
Pennsylvania in 2008 and throughout the
Appalachian Region in 2009, and implemented
successfully during the 2010 and 2011 breeding
seasons. Partners in nine states, with
supplemental support from USFWS, carried out
Golden-winged Warbler sampling at roughly 520
points each year, giving us the ability to detect
significant regional population changes. The
flexibility of the spatially balanced monitoring
design allows for additional sampling within
states, provinces, and focal areas to provide
inferences at finer spatial scales and to track the
fate of local populations. Wildlife agencies in
eight states (KY, MD, NC, NJ, PA, TN, VA, WV)
have committed to future monitoring of sampling
points within their states. Centralized
coordination of monitoring and data
management and analysis, as well as
coordination of field personnel to complete the
sampling design, will be necessary to fully
implement this evaluation program.
Presently, spatially balanced monitoring is only
being implemented in the Appalachian region
where populations have been declining for
decades. However, given that Golden-winged
Warblers are now declining in the upper Midwest
and Canada, and the BBS program has route-level