Landbird Monitoring Network
of the Americas (LaMNA)


The Landbird Monitoring Network of the Americas (LaMNA) is a joint effort of individuals, organizations, and government agencies in the Western Hemisphere. Our overall goal is to collect, archive, and make available the data and results of monitoring efforts from stations across the Americas. LaMNA stems from a meeting of the Migration Monitoring Council, a joint United States and Canada endeavor that set standards and objectives for migration monitoring in 1991. LaMNA is intended to be a complement to the Canadian Migration Monitoring Network and was formed under the auspices of the Monitoring and Inventory Working Group of Partners in Flight/Compaņeros en Vuelo/Partenaires d'Envol.

Red-eyed Vireo, Tortuguero, Costa Rica. Photo by John Woodcock

Erecting a mist net, Siead Valley, Klamath National Forest, California. Photo by Sam Cuenca


The resulting Network is a program aimed at expanding knowledge of the status of landbirds by monitoring their populations with a network of interacting, constant-effort monitoring stations, notably for changes in population numbers and composition, migratory routes and stopover habitats. The Network is intended to address an important gap in the present knowledge of migratory and resident birds: the understanding of bird population dynamics at continent-wide scales. To do so, LaMNA promotes cooperation and collaboration throughout the Americas. It is designed to address basic questions of resident and migratory birds regarding life histories, migration patterns, species composition, population size, habitat relationships, trends, and ecology. Its formation recognizes the urgent need for coordination among cooperating stations and, in particular, a mechanism for central coordination to provide support, data management and sharing, archiving, and analysis.

Recently, we have been developing methods for archiving data and facilitating communication between members with newsletters and meetings. Though the main intent of the Network is to increase our understanding of bird populations throughout the Western Hemisphere, we welcome participation by all stations. For more detailed information on the network, see "Proposal for the Pilot Network of Migration Monitoring in North America."

Membership Information

We invite you to join LaMNA. Membership is free and open to all. We send out regular newsletters and other updates to our members. If you are interested in joining, please fill out our Application for Membership form (in Word 2002).


History of the Network:
The Migration Monitoring Network, LaMMNA, and LaMNA

The Migration Monitoring Council, a joint United States and Canada endeavor, met in 1991 to set standards and objectives for migration monitoring. In 1998, they solicited information from stations in North and Latin America that were actively monitoring bird migration by the use of capture and release, census, and other methods at intesive field sites. The resulting listing became the Migration Monitoring Network, and was the foundation of the current network of stations. During 2005, the Klamath Bird Observatory and the U.S. Forest Service's Redwood Sciences Laboratory, with support from the Bureau of Land Management's Migratory Bird Program and Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology, PRBO Conservation Science, and many other individuals and organizations, worked together to formalize the Network as the Landbird Migration Monitoring Network of the Americas (LaMMNA). But because our efforts are not solely restricted to migratory birds, in May of 2007 we opted to remove the word “Migration” from the name, becoming the Landbird Monitoring Network of the Americas (LaMNA). This was done with due acknowledgement that migration monitoring is an important objective of LaMNA, and an all-important link for conservation efforts across the Americas. LaMNA would not be possible without the efforts of numerous cooperators. Member stations are listed in the document “Landbird Monitoring Network of the Americas Member Organizations.”

 

Migration monitoring count, Tortuguero, Costa Rica. Photo by Pablo Herrera.

Webmaster: Linda L. Long,
Updated August 21, 2007