- Charles Nilon, University of Missouri
- Paige S. Warren, University of Massachusetts
The Baltimore Birdscape project is a breeding bird survey intended to find out what birds are breeding in Baltimore and where. Volunteers from the local area will survey the entire city and find what areas are rich in breeding bird diversity. We will then make a map of where these birds are located. Through the survey efforts of local volunteers this project will show associations among land cover, landuse, and habitat features with breeding bird abundance, to provide information for land managers on possible consequences of land use changes on bird communities. The Baltimore Birdscape data will provide an overview of bird distributions within Baltimore City. In 2002 we did point counts on a a 50 point random sample of the BirdScape grid.
The Baltimore Parks Project will examine the ecological and social role of small, neighborhood parks in the urban residential areas. This work will expand upon and provide comparisons with the existing study of neighborhood parks in Phoenix. Results from the Phoenix study indicate that parks in lower income and minority neighborhoods support lower bird species diversity than similar parks in more affluent areas. In Baltimore, we will build on the findings from Phoenix to examine how social, cultural and economic factors may account for ecological variation in urban parks and neighborhoods.
Comparisons between Birdscape and the Parks Project will serve to validate results from each study.
