The Point Blue's Sierra Nevada Bioregional Monitoring project aims to conduct distribution population monitoring targeted towards the habitats of four management indicator species (MIS) in order to track changes in their (and associated species) distributions at the Sierra Nevada region scale by monitoring the changes in their occurrence across a large number of consistenly sampled locations.
In 2007, the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan was amended to adopt a common list of MIS and associated monitoring strategies for all ten forests in the Sierra Nevada: the Eldorado, Inyo, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Sequoia, Sierra, Stanislaus, and Tahoe National Forests and Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. The amended MIS strategy identifies eleven terrestrial habitats or ecosystem components and twelve wildlife species whose populations are designated to be indicative of habitat management.
We have designed a plan for monitoring and evaluating the response of four of the twelve Management Indicator Species(MIS) selected by the Forest Service to help guide management of the 10 Sierra Nevada National Forests. Mountain Quail (Oreortyx pictus) was selected as the indicator for early and mid-seral conifer forest, Fox Sparrow (Passerella iliaca) as the indicator for chaparral shrubland, Yellow Warbler (Dendroica petechia) as the indicator for riparian habitat, and Hairy Woodpecker (Picoides villosus) as the indicator for snags in green forest.
See the following reports and literature for more information on study design, methods, results, and conclusions:
