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THE NEOTROPICAL AVIAN ECOLOGY AND DEMOGRAPHICS PROGRAM
The major focus of The Institute's Neotropical Avian Ecology and Demographics Program at this time is to facilitate the development and establishment of the
- MoSI (Monitoreo de Sobrevivencia Invernal -- Monitoring Overwintering Survival) Program. MoSI is a cooperative effort among agencies, organizations, and individual bird-banders in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to operate a network of mist-netting stations to monitor habitat-specific overwintering survival rates for both migratory and resident landbird species.
Russet-crowned Motmot (Momotus mexicanus)
(Photograph courtesy of Manuel Grosselet)The New World Tropics, extending from Mexico and the Caribbean Islands through Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, provide the richest environments on Earth for birds. Habitats range from steaming coastal mangroves through lush tropical rainforests, broad extensive savannahs, diverse sub-tropical cloud forests, and temperate montane broadleaf and conifer forests to harsh high altitude paramo and low-elevation desert habitats. Not only do the Neotropics contain the greatest diversity of resident avian species on the planet, they also host vast numbers of wintering individuals of several hundred species that migrate there from their breeding grounds in the temperate regions of North America. While some of these Nearctic-Neotropical migratory species seem to loose themselves in winter in the vastness of the Amazon Basin, and others winter on the slopes of the Andes or even push on to the pampas of Argentina, the majority of species and individuals winter in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean Islands. Here their numbers are compressed into an area that is but a fraction of the area they occupy on their breeding ranges in Canada and the United States. And here they must share this limited area with a great abundance and diversity of resident species.
Despite many excellent studies on the ecology of wintering Neotropical migrants, we really understand very little of the complex web of interactions among these species, the resident species, and their environments. Even less is known about the demographics of birds in the Neotropics and about the vital rates (productivity and survival) that drive those demographics. How these vital rates vary among different habitats and how they relate to landscape-level habitat characteristics are critical questions for avian conservation in the Neotropics. Despite the general prevailing warmth, a great deal of seasonality in moisture, and in the responses of plants to that moisture, exists in the Neotropics. How this seasonality, and the annual variability in this seasonality, drives the ecological relationships that exist among both migratory and resident Neotropical birds and affects their demographics is another critically important focus for study.
An urgency exists for addressing the questions just raised. This urgency derives from two causes. First, some of the greatest rates of tropical deforestation and habitat degradation occur in the Neotropics, particularly in the limited landmass of the northern Neotropics where the majority of the migratory species winter. Second, ongoing and accelerating global climate change is likely to have a profoundly damaging effect on avian habitat relationships in the Neotropics, especially because these relationships tend to be narrow and specialized in order to accommodate the abundance and diversity of Neotropical species.
The Institute for Bird Populations is committed to furthering the understanding of how climate, weather, and habitat characteristics, and their interrelationships, influence the ecology and demographics of both migratory and resident Neotropical birds. Our ultimate goal, however, is to utilize this understanding to help formulate management and conservation strategies for reversing the population declines of Neotropical birds that can be implemented in the context of environmental and economic sustainability.
In addition to the MoSI Program, The Institute aims to facilitate the implementation of a TMAPS (Tropical Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship) Program in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Because of extended and non-synchronous breeding seasons for many species in the Neotropics, protocols are likely to differ from the standardized MAPS protocol in use in the United States and Canada. Several experimental TMAPS stations are currently in operation in Mexico and Belize to investigate various protocols.
The impetus for both MoSI and TMAPS arose from The Institute's Avian Survivorship Project at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which was begun in October 1998. The purpose of this 5-year study is to determine annual and overwintering survival of both migratory and resident landbirds in three major habitat types on the installation, and to monitor the reproductive success of the resident species by mist netting and direct nest monitoring.
