Dear Friends,

As you can see on my research page, I have been actively conducting conservation research in El Salvador since 1992. Most of my projects have been funded by grants, but sometimes an urgent research need or opportunity arises, too quickly to obtain grant funding. Please consider supporting the project described below with a donation. I still need about $2000 cash, a field computer, and I may also be interested in a volunteer field assistant.

The project I describe below forms part of my doctoral dissertation. It must be completed in the coming months, but I have raised only part of the funds needed. The budget is $6000 and I have raised to date $600, with grant proposals pending for an additional $3,400. If you can help, please contact me. I will be most grateful. Here are the details...

PROJECT: Distribution and conservation of montane birds in El Salvador: Do protected areas protect them? 21 April to 30 July 2001.

Summary

This project seeks to evaluate six montane forested sites for possible inclusion in the El Salvador protected area system. Bird populations at the sites will be inventoried, and compared with data for four existing protected areas. I will use a complementarity algorithm to evaluate the relative importance of the 10 sites for birds. The work will contribute to the national inventory of El Salvador's fauna, and to doctoral research on the ecology and conservation of montane forest birds in El Salvador. It will be carried out during three months (May, June, and July) in 2001. I plan to travel to El Salvador approximately 10 days prior to the start of field work.

Field work must take place during the stated time period for two reasons: (1) to inventory birds while they are actively breeding; and (2) because the same period next year is planned for a larger study, the monitoring of bird populations in coffee plantations compared with natural forest (the last and major chapter of my doctoral dissertation).

The main objective is to provide the first conservation analysis of highland forested sites, based on the presence of threatened birds, that permits a logical prioritization of conservation efforts in El Salvador. With the present study, I intend to collect the distribution information needed for that analysis, and use it to ask two questions: (1) Does the El Salvador protected areas system adequately protect montane birds? (2) Where should additional reserves be placed to optimize bird conservation efforts in montane areas of El Salvador?

1. Use literature and collections databases to create preliminary local species lists for 10 montane sites in El Salvador.
2. Visit the six least documented sites for one week each during 1 May to 15 June (beginning of the rainy season), and again during 15 June to 30 July (the early-middle rainy season). (In total, about two weeks per field site.)
3. Ten localities to be analyzed are forested areas above 750 m elevation (See accompanying map). Protected areas are: Montecristo, El Imposible, and Los Andes national parks, and San Marcelino Wildlife Refuge (Las Lajas Forest). Other areas are Chalatenango and Perquín highlands, Cerro Cacaguatique, San Vicente and San Miguel volcanos, and Sierra del Bálsamo. During past field work I have compiled reasonably complete locality bird lists for the four protected areas. During the 2001 breeding season, I will visit the six non-protected areas to conduct complementary inventories.

Image galleries for Montecristo, El Imposible, Los Andes national parks, and Las Lajas forest.

Inventory methods will include preparing species accumulation curves for all habitats visited. Observations of birds will be grouped into 4–hr sessions for standardization. For each main habitat type (pine-oak forest, shaded coffee plantation, scrub habitat, etc.), a species accumulation curve will be calculated after each session's observations. The shapes and statistics of these curves will permit decisions on where to best invest time available to complete the inventories (Peterson and Slade 1998).

Each site will be visited for a minimum of 8 days divided as two 4–day periods. When the curves level off, and statistics indicate that sampling is 95% complete, sampling will be terminated. To avoid seasonal biases of species detection, visits to each site will be divided between early and late breeding season.

Collecting birds.—Pending approval of permits, collecting of bird voucher specimens will take place during the second round of site visits, over a six week period, using mist-nets to capture birds. Up to 60 individuals per site will be collected, with vouchers distributed across as many species as possible. In addition to study skins, some birds will be preserved as whole specimens and skeletons; tissue samples (heart, liver, breast muscle) will be collected from all individuals. These vouchers will permit future systematic studies of these populations, some of which may represent isolated, recognizable forms with potentially unique evolutionary histories and trajectories. Representative series of skins will be deposited at the El Salvador Museum of Natural History, based on agreements between museums that will be determined once funding is arranged. All genetic material will be deposited at the KU Natural History Museum.

Complementarity analysis.—The complementarity analysis (Margules et al. 1988) is a heuristic algorithm to determine the optimum combination of protected areas that protects the most species. The algorithm identifies the site that protects the most species, and then determines which of the remaining localities protects the greatest number of new species, and so on.

The taxa to be considered are birds classified as "highland forest specialists or generalists" by Komar (1998). Following Remsen (1994), only resident taxa will be considered. The taxonomy will be that of the American Ornithologists' Union (1998). Although recognizable populations or subspecies (phylogenetic species) are more appropriate units for conservation analyses (Zink & McKitrick 1995, Meffee & Carroll 1997, Peterson & Navarro-Sigüenza 1999), recent systematic studies of northern Central American birds are scarce. Because the application of subspecific names has been inconsistent across taxa, including recognized subspecies in the analysis could provide misleading results.

The full budget for field work is $6,010 (See Table). Funding of $600 has been committed from Dr. A. Townsend Peterson (Dept. EEB, KU, and Division of Ornithology, NHM, KU). An additional $3400 has been requested from the Natural History Museum (KU) Panorama Grant, the KU Center of Latin American Studies Tinker Field Research Grant, and the Sigma Xi Grants-in-aid-of-research Program. The remaining budget items ($2010) will be requested from other sources. Transportation to and from field sites will be requested from local institutions in El Salvador.

Tropical montane forests are key to the conservation of avian diversity (Peterson et al. 1993, Long 1995). Nonetheless, distribution of montane birds through much of the tropics remains poorly known (Peterson et al. 1993). Most remaining natural habitat in El Salvador, with the exception of coastal mangrove forest, can be considered tropical montane forest, found above 750 m elevation. The lower elevations have mostly been deforested for planting corn, beans, sugar cane, melons, and other crops. Above 500 m and up to 1700 m, coffee is widely planted, such that only a few natural forest patches remain in this altitudinal zone. Above 1700 m, there is little agriculture, and natural habitats at this elevation are found in at least 11 isolated regions (See map).

Montane birds are here defined as species occurring in El Salvador primarily above 750 m elevation. Many of these species are classified as locally threatened (Komar 1998). All 18 El Salvador bird species classified as endemic to northern Central America are found in the montane regions, and 17 are exclusively montane in their distribution (Bibby et al. 1992, Komar 1998). Because montane areas are separated from other montane areas by lowlands, the distribution of montane-restricted bird species is patchy (Hernández-Baños et al. 1995, Watson & Peterson 1999). The isolation of patches suggests that, for some species, population dynamics in each patch may be independent, leading to a system that could follow metapopulation dynamics, leading to independent evolutionary trends among related populations. Patchy distributions of some species also suggest that conservation efforts should be appropriately distributed among montane patches to optimize conservation of diversity.

Long-term population studies to elucidate metapopulation dynamics, and studies of evolutionary trends, are outside the scope of this analysis. However, both types of studies require a complete baseline knowledge of distribution information. Distribution of montane birds in the El Salvador/Honduras region was compiled by Hernández-Baños et al. (1995) from the literature (Monroe 1968, Thurber et al. 1987) but all montane patches in the two countries were combined for their analyses, and distribution information for any one patch within the region was incomplete. The Hernández-Baños et al. (1995) compilation recognized 183 montane bird species for the Honduras/El Salvador region.