Developing and Implementing a Bird Migration Monitoring, Assessment, and Public Outreach Program for Your Community: The BirdCast Project

This handbook provides information your organization can use to create and implement a Web-based bird monitoring program. It presents detailed guidance, based on the experience of the EMPACT BirdCast Project, on how to: 1. Identify target communities that would be interested in reporting on and following the progress of bird migration; 2. Record and present real-time information about bird migration using radar, weather information, and acoustic monitoring; 3. Collect groundtruthing information from volunteer birders and present it to the public; 4. Provide education and outreach to members of the public about what to do when migratory birds pass through their area. This handbook provides simple "how to" instructions on each facet of planning and implementing a bird monitoring program, along will additional information about bird migration: Chapter 3 discusses bird migration as a general conservation issus and how the different members of a bird migration monitoring organization work with each other to help birds as they migrate; Chapter 4 discusses instrument-based observations of birds; Chapter 5 covers a variety of issues relevant to volunteer groundtruthing, including a detailed description of BirdCast's policies and experiences working with volunteer birders; Chapter 6 treats the methods and strategies a bird monitoring organization may make use of to conduct public outreach and education; Appendix A presents examples of education and outreach materials from the BirdCast project. Interspersed throughout the handbook are success stories and lessons learned in the course of the EMPACT BirdCast project.