Forest bird monitoring data from national forests of the western Great Lakes region

Data in this package represent bird observations from monitoring programs in National Forests of the western Great Lakes region; Chippewa, Superior, Chequamegon and Nicolet. The Chequamegon unit of the Nicolet National Forest is referred to as an individual National Forest, ‘Chequamegon’, in this package and the associated publication by Niemi et al. (2016). The data are summaries of the number of observations by bird species by forest stand and by year. Each stand ID by National Forest combination represents a set of unique locations (usually 1-3 points) surveyed annually in the Chippewa (1995-2011), Superior (1995-2011) and Chequamegon (1995-2010) National Forests or biennially in the Nicolet National Forest (1987-2011).Breeding bird communities in forests of the western Great Lakes region are among the most diverse in North America, but the forest environment in this region has changed dramatically during the past 150 years. Researchers have systematically monitored forest birds in the region for more than two decades to address concerns about loss of biodiversity due to ongoing forest harvesting and to better inform forest planning.Original metadata date was 06/07/2016. Updates to references were made on 7/11/2016. Minor metadata updates on 12/15/2016 and 1/12/2017.