The USFWS IPaC System Migratory Bird Lists Are New and Improving!

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's Information for Planning and Consultation (IPaC) system has been modified to work with the Avian Knowledge Network (AKN) to generate bird lists based on best available bird data. A user can also now see a graph of annual probability of presence for each species of concern in the project area.

Prior to this functionality, IPaC based migratory bird returns on course range maps created by replicating range maps developed by Paul Lehman in the 2014 edition of the National Geographic complete birds of North America: Alderfer, J. K., Dunn, J. L. 1., Lehman, P. E., & Barry, J. H. (2014). National Geographic complete birds of North America. Second edition, fully revised and updated. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic. Although these maps were chosen because they were deemed to be the best available range maps by species experts, they still only represented a very rough approximation of where certain bird species occurred. They also did not provide any information about when the birds might be occurring in a certain area.

To improve migratory bird returns, the system now talks directly with the AKN to determine which birds of concern have been reported based on a number of survey, banding and citizen science datasets to occur in the same county as the project over the past 10 years. It then generates the migratory bird list based on the information that's returned. The data is also modeled for each species to display a graph of the probability of presence for each species over the course of the year in the project area. That data can be used to help those conducting the project know when they should implement conservation measures to avoid or minimize impacts to these birds from their project activities. In early 2018, the lists will be refined even further to generate bird returns by looking at a list of birds reported within any 10km grid cells overlapped by the project, as opposed to the current county-based returns. It is anticipated that the lists generated in IPaC will only improve as more and more data is added to the AKN. To view the new system and functionality visit the IPaC system website.