Songbird surveys , 1952 - 1964, 1983 - 2008 Adirondack Long-Term Ecological Monitoring Program Project No. 2 Breeding Birds by Adirondack Ecological Center of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Newcomb, New York. Environmental Data Initiative.

Study objectives were to (1) Document long-term trends in relative abundance and diversity of breeding forest birds (songbirds) in forest stands with different harvest histories and (2) Identify bird species that can be used as indicators of habitat change or degradation. Declines in neotropical migrants have been linked to changes in habitat quantity and quality across species' range. Songbirds that nest and forage in different habitat types or at different heights in the forest canopy may not be affected equally by forest change or management. We detected breeding songbirds using point-counts at Huntington Wildlife Forest (HWF) in the central Adirondack Mountains of New York during 1983-2000 and modeled on an original songbird point count dataset from Webb et al. (1977). Relative abundance (RA, the number of individual birds/count) was measured in sites with differing management histories, from an unmanaged >300-year-old stand to a stand cut with the shelterwood/overstory removal method just prior to sampling in 1983). Over eighty bird species were detected during the study duration. Songbird ecology and habitat characteristics can be used to understand long-term changes in relative abundance as related to forest change.