III. GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF MAPS

The MAPS program is organized to fulfill three tiers of goals and objectives: monitoring, research, and management.

MONITORING - The specific monitoring goals of MAPS are to provide, for over 100 target species, including Neotropical-wintering migrants, temperate-wintering migrants, and permanent residents:

• indices of adult population size and post-fledging productivity from data on the numbers and proportions of young and adult birds captured; and
• estimates of adult population size, adult survival rates, proportions of residents, and recruitment into the adult population from mark-recapture data on adult birds.

RESEARCH - The specific research goals of MAPS are to identify and describe:

• temporal and spatial patterns in these demographic indices and estimates at a variety of spatial scales ranging from the local landscape to the entire continent; and
• relationships between these patterns and ecological characteristics of the target species, population trends of the target species, station-specific and landscape-level habitat characteristics, and spatially-explicit weather variables.

MANAGEMENT - The specific management goals of MAPS are to use these patterns and relationships, at the appropriate spatial scales, to:

• determine the proximate demographic cause(s) of population change;
• suggest management actions and conservation strategies to reverse population declines and maintain stable or increasing populations; and
• evaluate the effectiveness of the management actions and conservation strategies actually implemented through an adaptive management framework.

II: Overview   IV: Recent Results