March 24 Chapel Hill Bird Club

["Karen Bearden" <chickadeebirders@earthlink.net>]

Howdy!

Sure wish we didn't have so much going on at home so we could take a
trip to the coast. Guess we'll have to hear the stories from other
Chapel Hill Bird Club members on Monday!

You're invited to the Chapel Hill Bird Club meeting Monday, March 24.
Sarah Mabey, Smith Fellow for The Nature Conservancy at NCSU, will
present her program, "Applying Remote Sensing Tools to Regional
Conservation Planning for Migratory Landbird Stopover Sites."

The dramatic seasonal migrations of Nearctic-Neotropical migratory
landbirds confound efforts to design effective conservation strategies
that will protect migrants throughout
all phases of their annual cycle, particularly during passage.  However,
advances in radar ornithology, geographic information systems (GIS), and
our understanding of stopover ecology now make it possible to begin
addressing the conservation needs of migrating landbirds at
appropriately large scales. Sarah will present an overview of an
on-going project
that employs weather surveillance radar and GIS tools to locate
migratory stopover sites and integrate the temporal and spatial patterns
of landbird stopover with data on land cover, habitat configuration, and
land use. The goal of the project is to develop a standardized ranking
system for prioritizing the conservation value of migratory landbird
stopover sites based on data from the southern Mid-Atlantic region.

Refreshments are at 7:15 pm; the meeting starts at 7:30 pm at Binkley
Baptist Church on Willow Drive at 15/501 in Chapel Hill, near University
Mall. Due to church renovation, our meeting will be held in the
Fellowship Hall this month.

With spring migration upon us, this will be a timely and informative
program. Hope to see you there!

Happy birding! Karen Bearden
Raleigh, NC
chickadeebirders@earthlink.net