3  Executive Summary

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies (Bird Conservancy), in conjunction with its partners, conducted the 15th consecutive year of landbird monitoring for the Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions (IMBCR) program.

IMBCR is based on a spatially balanced sampling design which provides inference to avian populations at various scales, from local management units to entire states or Bird Conservation Regions, facilitating conservation at local and national levels. The nested design also provides a consistent and flexible framework for understanding and comparing the status and annual changes of bird populations with local and regional context.

Collaboration across organizations and spatial scales increases sample sizes and improves the accuracy and precision of population estimates. Analyzing the data collectively allows us to estimate detection probabilities for species that would otherwise have insufficient numbers of detections at local scales.

For these reasons, the IMBCR program is well-positioned to address conservation and management needs for a wide range of stakeholders, encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to bird conservation that combines monitoring, research, and management.

In 2022, the IMBCR program’s area of inference encompassed four entire states (Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming) and portions of 11 additional states (Arizona, California, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Dakota). We surveyed across US Forest Service (USFS) Regions 1, 2, and 4 and in portions of Region 3; all of the Badlands and Prairies Bird Conservation Region (BCR 17), and portions of nine other BCRs: Great Basin (9), Northern Rockies (10), Prairie Potholes (11), Sierra Nevada (15), Southern Rockies/Colorado Plateau (16), Shortgrass Prairie (18), Central Mixed Grass Prairie (19), Sonoran and Mojave Deserts (33), and Sierra Madre Occidental (34).

Observers conducted 15,137 point counts within the 1,348 surveyed sampling units between May 1 and July 25, 2022. They detected 176,954 individual birds representing 350 species. This report summarizes the results of the 2022 field season.