Montana Motus Prioritization Tool Data

Addressing survival and movement of priority migratory avian species of concern along the Pacific Flyway is paramount for their conservation. Yet, the migratory life stage is understudied in many avian species. The Motus radiotelemetry receiver network is an established system for tracking survival and movement of avian species. This network is an international collaborative that successfully identifies stopover site duration, connected migratory routes, post-fledging dispersal and survival, and adult survival and fidelity on a landscape-scale; parameters that cannot be easily estimated using non-tagged birds. While the Motus network is highly connected in eastern North America, the western part of the continent is lagging in coverage and connectivity, limiting the ability to obtain sample sizes large enough to robustly model demographic parameters from tagged birds. Thus, the expansion of the Motus network is a high priority for Pacific Flyway State Agencies. To date, no method exists for determining priority locations for new Motus receiving stations. With collaborations from States and the Canadian Province of British Columbia, we used eBird citizen scientist data to prioritize strategic locations for new Motus receiving stations throughout the Pacific Flyway. We model priority species’ co-occupancy of varying abundance states (i.e., absent, present, abundant, abundant in multiple weeks) with spatially varying Landsat (red and near infrared), water, land cover types, and weather covariates while accounting for variable detection with temporally varying survey effort covariates. Using occupancy model predictions, we identify high-use areas of the Pacific Flyway for establishing new Motus receiving towers that have high probabilities of intercepting high presence and /or abundance of multiple species of interest in a series of predictive occupancy maps. This package contains all the necessary files to recreate the data analysis, print out maps based on predictions from the model, and conduct new analyses for the state of Montana.

解决太平洋迁飞路线上重点关注的优先迁徙鸟类物种的生存与移动问题，对其保护至关重要。然而，许多鸟类的迁徙生活史阶段研究不足。Motus无线电遥测接收网络是一个成熟的系统，用于追踪鸟类的生存和移动。该网络是一个国际合作项目，能在景观尺度上成功确定停歇地停留时间、连通的迁徙路线、雏鸟离巢后的扩散与生存，以及成鸟的生存和忠诚度；这些参数无法通过未标记鸟类轻易估算。虽然Motus网络在北美东部连接度很高，但该大陆西部的覆盖和连接度仍滞后，限制了获取足够大样本量以从标记鸟类中稳健建模种群统计参数的能力。因此，扩展Motus网络是太平洋迁飞路线各州机构的优先事项。迄今为止，尚无确定新Motus接收站优先位置的方法。与各州及加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省合作，我们利用eBird公民科学家数据，为整个太平洋迁飞路线的新Motus接收站确定战略优先位置。我们对优先物种在不同丰度状态（即不存在、存在、丰富、多周丰富）下的共占位进行建模，纳入空间变化的Landsat数据（红光和近红外）、水体、土地覆盖类型和天气协变量，同时通过时间变化的调查努力协变量考虑检测的变异性。利用占位模型预测，我们在一系列预测性占位图中识别出太平洋迁飞路线的高频使用区域，这些区域建立新Motus接收塔后，截获多种目标物种高存在率和/或高丰度的概率较高。该数据包包含所有必要文件，可用于重现数据分析、打印基于模型预测的地图，以及针对蒙大拿州开展新分析。