Using conservation plans and bird monitoring to evaluate ecological effects of management: An example with fuels reduction activities in southwest Oregon

increasingly, regional conservation plans are using information about how animals respond to changes in habitat characteristics to provide guidelines for management. However, the ability of these plans to effectively guide management remains largely untested. To test a regional bird conservation plan developed by Partners in Flight, we compared bird abundance in untreated stands to that of stands where shrub cover had been reduced to lower the risk of fire. We used these data to evaluate whether birds identified as focal species in the conservation plan increased or decreased in abundance as a result of the treatments. Over a two-year period, two of 12 Partners in Flight oak woodland and chaparral focal species were more abundant at treated units in both years; no species were consistently less abundant at treated units in both years. These results suggest small-scale (7-42 ha) treatments are consistent with the objectives identified in the Partners in Flight regional conservation plan because they benefited species associated with edges, but did not have negative effects on shrub-associated species. We suggest that this is a result of the small size of treatments and the retention of shrub patches in treated areas. An alternative explanation is that the bird/habitat relationships used to develop the conservation plans do not apply in this study area. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the correlations between habitat characteristics and bird abundance with the information in the conservation plans. In all but one case, the direction of the correlation agreed with information in the conservation plan. This project illustrates that even though the ability of conservation plans to predict the ecological effects of management activities may be limited, they can play an important role in interpreting the results of ecological monitoring. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.