The Central Hardwoods and the Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Ventures were honored with a Wings Across the Americas Award for their work on modeling habitat for priority forest birds.

Spring 2008

Innovative modeling work by the Central Hardwoods Joint Venture was recently honored with a Wings Across the Americas Award. The award is presented each year by the US Forest Service to recognize Forest Service employees and their partners for outstanding work on bird, bat and butterfly conservation.

The project, which was a collaboration with the Lower Mississippi Valley Joint Venture, will help land managers understand what constitutes suitable habitat, where it is distributed and how management decisions might affect priority, forest-breeding birds.

"We wanted to find a better and more sophisticated way to link bird populations to habitat conditions," said CHJV Coordinator Jane Fitzgerald. "With that information, we can figure out the best places to do conservation and understand what factors are driving the variation in habitat quality, so we can try to mitigate the bad and build on the good."

The models were created by post-doctoral fellows Todd Jones-Farrand and John Tirpak, under the guidance of CHJV partners Dr. Frank R. Thompson III, from the US Forest Service North Central Experiment Station in Columbia, Missouri, and Dr. Dan Twedt, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The work is novel both for making use of Forest Inventory Analysis data, which allowed the models to include forest structure variables such as canopy closure and forest maturity, and for linking the habitat suitability indices to bird population levels, as measured by the Breeding Bird Survey. This second step should allow land managers to calculate what effect different management actions, such as converting forests to savannas, will have on different species.

Models were developed for two Bird Conservation Regions, the Central Hardwoods and the West Gulf Coastal Plain. In April, a three-day workshop in Memphis introduced the Joint Venture partners to this new decision-support tool.

Because the methods used to develop the models are adaptable to other regions, the models were also introduced to the bird conservation community during a 2-hour workshop at the Partners in Flight meeting in McAllen, Texas, in February.

Gary Myers, Director of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, accepted the award on behalf of the two Joint Ventures at the Wings Across the Americas Awards Ceremony held in Phoenix in March.

More on the Forest Bird Habitat Suitability Index Modeling Project

The Forest Bird Modeling project generates models such as this one, which shows the computed Habitat Suitability Index (HSI) for Blue-winged Warblers for each subsection in the Central Hardwoods Bird Conservation Region. HSI varies from 0 (least suitable) to 1 (most suitable), based on 2001 National Land Cover data, Forest Inventory Analysis data, land form and landscape variables.