Are National Parks Good Bird Habitat?

National park units are thought to be islands of habitat in a broader matrix of changing landscapes, but not all parks offer such refuge. We set out to determine if there was a difference between the prevalence of bird species of interest in parks and areas with similar land cover outside of parks, and we wanted to see if we could infer how habitat available within and around park borders may affect any difference in bird populations. We used North American Breeding Bird Survey data to predict occupancy of bird species of concern in 32 Midwest Region (MWR) national park units across nine Bird Conservation Regions (BCR) based on land cover in and around those parks. We then compared the predictions with bird survey data collected through monitoring programs in each national park unit to determine if bird species of concern were more or less prevalent in parks than expected. This resource brief focuses only on the Great Lakes Network parks.