Mountain Birdwatch 2.0: 2010-2018

Mountain Birdwatch (MBW) 2.0 is a long-term citizen science monitoring program for 10 bird and 1 mammal species that breed in high-elevation spruce-fir forests of the northeastern United States and, formerly, southeastern Canada. Initiated in 2000 as Mountain Birdwatch 1.0, MBW provides the only region-wide source of population information on these high-elevation breeding birds. Each June, under the coordination of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, volunteers perform repeated point counts at nearly 750 long-term fixed sampling sites along hiking routes in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and eastern New York. Primary emphasis was placed on Bicknell’s Thrush, a montane-fir specialist that breeds only in the Northeastern U.S. and adjacent portions of Canada. In 2010, the program underwent many positive changes to reemerge as Mountain Birdwatch 2.0. All of the sampling locations prior to 2010 were permanently abandoned, and new sampling locations were chosen using a generalized random tessellation stratified (GRTS) procedure. For more information see: https://vtecostudies.org/projects/mountains/mountain-birdwatch/