About 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/Compañeros en Vuelo/Partenaires d'Envol.

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 the understanding of bird population dynamics at continent-wide scales, an important gap in the present knowledge of migratory and resident birds. 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.

We have developed methods for archiving and exploring banding data, working alongside the Avian Knowledge Network, who pioneered data archiving for landbird census data.

We facilitate 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.

LaMNA would not be possible without the efforts of numerous cooperators. Members are listed in the document “Landbird Monitoring Network of the Americas Member Organizations.”

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 intensive 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).

In May of 2007, we opted to remove the word “Migration” from the name, becoming the Landbird Monitoring Network of the Americas (LaMNA) because our efforts are not solely restricted to migratory birds. This was done with due acknowledgement that migration monitoring remains an important objective of LaMNA and an all-important link for conservation efforts across the Americas.