| Project Description |
The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP),
Montgomery County, MD, has been charged with assessing the condition of
environmental resources in the county, in order to evaluate the effectiveness
of current resource protection programs. For a countywide assessment of stream
conditions, DEP sampled communities of fish and aquatic invertebrates, and
developed indexes of biological integrity (IBIs) that were used to
characterize stream resource conditions and to identify sub-watersheds that
are priorities for protection or restoration efforts. They would like to
similarly assess the condition of habitats in the county for amphibians and
breeding birds, and have requested assistance from PWRC in the design and
conduct of surveys of amphibian and breeding birds, and in development of IBIs
for these taxa. A Bird Community Index, developed to indicate ecological
condition of the Mid-Atlantic Highlands (OConnell et al. 2000, U.S. EPA 2000),
provides a model for birds, but the approach needs modification to be
applicable in a highly fragmented urbanizing landscape and to account for
differences in species detection probabilities. Surveys will be designed so
that estimators of species richness (Boulinier et al. 1998), relative species
richness (Nichols et al. 1998), and proportion of area occupied (J.D. Nichols,
unpubl.) can be applied to develop estimators of biotic community integrity.
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