Data for: Causal mechanisms for negative impacts of energy development inform management triggers for sagebrush birds

Estimated population trends can identify declining species to focus biological conservation, but monitoring may fail to illuminate causes of population change and strategies for reversing declines. Monitoring programs can relate trends with environmental attributes to test causal hypotheses, but typical analytical approaches do not explicitly support causal inference, diluting available data for informing conservation. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) extended Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions with a quasi-experimental sampling design over a 10-year period (2010–2019) to evaluate impacts of oil and gas development on sagebrush birds within the Atlantic Rim Natural Gas Development Project in southern Wyoming. We analyzed resulting data using a multi-scale community occupancy model to estimate trends in species occupancy and richness relevant to management triggers. Additionally, we employed path analysis to evaluate mechanisms underlying observed trends to inform..., Bird data were collected in conjunction with the Integrated Monitoring and Bird Conservation Regions program, and environmental data were retrieved primarily from online repositories. Detailed methods are described in the manuscript accompanying this repository., Scripts for analyzing data in this repository are archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7566617. Data were analyzed in Program R with modeling implemented using the R package nimble. Most data provided here are stored in an R workspace and thus require Program R to access them.