Research design considerations to ensure detection of all species in an avian community

1.Recent advances in the estimation of species richness from count data have allowed avian ecologists to incorporate incomplete detectability of species when comparing richness across space or time. Raw counts from single or repeated visits to sample point(s) are nonetheless still used for assessing community composition, and the failure to account for detectability when making these evaluations may lead to incorrect inferences about the community. 2.We estimated detection probabilities (p) for a suite of bird species and used these detection probabilities to determine the minimum number of visits at a single point and the minimum number of points in a grid required to confidently (≥ 90%) detect the full community of birds for rare, moderately rare, and common species. We used occupancy modeling to estimate the detection probabilities for species from two study sites in Nebraska and Saskatchewan. 3.Some common or highly detectable species were confidently detected in a single visit to a...