Surf scoter photo by cookierace

Modeling sea duck trends in the transboundary waters of the Salish Sea

Led by David Bradley, Birds Canada
Collaborators include
Puget Sound Bird Observatory, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Environment and Climate Change Canada

Recognizing that transboundary monitoring of marine birds has been challenging and not always seamless, researchers propose to applying spatially explicit hierarchical analytical techniques in a Bayesian framework to assess transboundary trends of all waterbird species–including priority sea ducks–regularly monitored by two parallel citizen science programs in Canada (British Columbia Coastal Waterbird Survey: BCCWS) and the U.S. (Puget Sound Seabird Survey: PSSS). This will make the survey data freely available for agencies and other scientists to analyze and also will produce abundant information for the general public that will be visually displayed on Birds Canada’s NatureCounts web platform.