National Status and Trends of Canada’s Birds

Abstract

The Canadian Wildlife Service’s national wildlife management and assessment teams conduct research supporting the population monitoring and management of Canada’s migratory birds. Research centers around three overall themes: 1) optimizing applied population monitoring, for both professional and citizen science programs, as well as automated monitoring technologies; 2) developing integrated statistical methods to improve estimates of population sizes, status, trends and distribution; and 3) coordinating research and reporting with international partners to inform conservation across the full annual cycle. Ongoing and upcoming research projects involve: developing integrated spatiotemporal models of population status and drivers of trends using monitoring, remote sensing, and demographic data; developing object detection models to automate counts from seabird colony photo surveys; improving statistical models for estimating density and population sizes; improving breeding waterfowl population estimates by optimizing survey designs and accounting for bias in sex ratios; and improving surveys and models to estimate harvest of migratory birds.