Bird Community Monitoring
Weminuche Audubon Society (WAS)
The Weminuche Audubon Society (affiliated with the National Audubon Society) is a non-profit organization based out of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. The WAS was formed in 2007 and is committed to the conservation of bird and wildlife habitat.
WAS has partnered with San Juan Headwaters Forest Health Partnership to conduct a Citizen Science Project to address the following question: “What are the effects, if any, that forest thinning treatments or prescribed fire have on bird community composition and structure?”
Together, WAS and SJHFHP designed a long term study to collect data on the presence and number of bird species in areas with varied forest health treatments (thinning, thinning + fire and no treatment). Annual reports and other resources can be found below.
Learn more about Weminuche Audubon Society and get involved
Reports and Accomplishments
- Fifth Year Report (2023): The Effects of Prescribed Fire and Shrub-layer Mastication on Bird Communities in Ponderosa Pine Forests of the San Juan Mountains, CO
- Fourth Year Report (2022)
- Summary of accomplishments from 2021
- Comprehensive summary of accomplishments from 2021 (video)
- 2021 BMP Report
- 2020 BMP Report
- 2019 BMP Report
- February 24, 2022
- WAS Board member and retired Professor of Biology, Ecology and Environmental science, Herb Grover, discusses findings from the Bird Community Monitoring project.
Other bird/forest ecology research and resources:
- Third Year Report: The Effects of Prescribed Fire and Shrub-layer Mastication on Bird Communities in Ponderosa Pine Forests of the San Juan Mountain, CO
- Article from Herb Grover at Wayland Baptist University
- Birds and Burns: Can Prescribed Fire Limit Wildfire Severity While Maintaining Fire’s Ecological Importance to Bird Species?
- A interesting and easy-to-read article by the Rocky Mountain Research Station
- Incorporating woodpecker habitat into design for post-fire salvage logging
- Webinar featuring Dr. Vicki Saab and Jon Dudley
- After the Flames: the Flipside of Wildfire
- Blog post from Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed
- Of Woodpeckers and Harvests: Finding Compatibility Between Habitat and Salvage Logging
- Science You Can Use Bulletin from the Rocky Mountain Research Station