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.”