Partners in flight

abundanceR (http://tools.sepif.org/abundan...) now works with KY's grassland bird monitoring data on quail focus areas.

Found an interesting new blog that summaries conservation-related journal articles ( http://www.conservationmaven.com/ )

Getting ready to send the SEPIF Field Guide to Web Technology for Bird Conservation out for external review. We'll be officially releasing it during the SEPIF meeting on March 9.

National data management priorities and proposed budget for landbirds, waterbirds, and shorebirds is now on its way to the US NABCI committee

Lots of interesting results from 3 yrs of Rangewide Eastern Painted Bunting Survey. Looks like there are a lot more buntings than we thought, particularly away from the coast, and populations seem to be increasing. Reports and manuscripts now in prep.

Really interesting paper showing reduced survival after blood sampling in cliff swallows (http://www.bioone.org/doi...)

Here's the draft agenda for the 2010 SEPIF meeting (http://sepif.org). It's still early but things are starting to come together.

Here's a sneak peak (attached) of what the new data analysis tool looks like right now.

New discussion forum for the SEPIF website coming soon.

Just back from Midwest Coordinated Bird Monitoring Meeting. Lots of potential for getting more Midwestern folks in the Eastern Grassland Bird working group and potentially forming an Eastern Urban Birds working group.

New Southeast Partners in Flight custom search engine that only searches selected websites (e.g., Joint Ventures, National PIF, SEPIF website) now available in the Labs section of the SEPIF page (http://sepif.org/content...)

Just back from NABCI data management meeting. We got a good start on a resource needs document (FTEs, etc), National data management strategy, and an evaluation method for priority databases/data centers. I'll have something for the larger group to review soon.

Increasing BBS trends for some Southeast priority species: Swainson's Warbler (http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/cgi-bin...) and Painted Bunting (http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/cgi-bin...). Certainly not what I would've expected

According to the BBS, the declines of many priority species began to slow in the 90s. For example, here's Golden-winged Warbler in the Southeast (http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/cgi-bin...)

Working with Mark on ways for outside programs to pull data directly out of the USGS point count database. This should be a good path to connect to the AKN as well.