Working Together to Conserve Migratory Birds Across the Hemisphere https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/proposals-2019/working-together-to-conserve-migratory-birds-across-the-hemisphere https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/@@site-logo/sitelogo-75x75.png

Working Together to Conserve Migratory Birds Across the Hemisphere

Additional Information
Used for	Migratory birds are a precious resource shared by lands and people across the Americas, and protecting them is our mutual responsibility. For nearly 20 years, The Institute for Bird Populations' (IBP) MoSI program has worked with partners in 22 countries to monitor and protect migratory birds and understand the causes for their decline. We are requesting funds to support this program, including our projects of Micro-grants for the purchase of needed equipment, and our Fellowship Project that brings early career Latin American conservation scientists to study with our field crews in the U.S.
Benefits	Birds are a source of inspiration and joy to people all over the world, and provide important ecological services such as pollination, seed dispersal, and insect and pest control. But migratory birds are in trouble: a recent report in the journal Science reports that nearly three billion birds have been lost in the past 5 decades, about half of them migratory species. IBP's MoSI program, working with support from organizations like the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation, works with hundreds of collaborators across the Americas to understand the causes of bird decline, provide scientific information to decision makers, and help train the next generation of Latin American conservation scientists.
Proposal Description	The Institute for Bird Populations is a non-profit conservation organization that works in the U.S., Latin America, and other parts of the world to generate the science that supports species diversity and effective conservation. We partner with NGOs, government agencies, and universities, and have published hundreds of papers, nearly all of which are available from our free publications database. Migratory birds are in trouble: In the past half century, more than half of all species have sharply declined -- a loss of billions of birds. It’s not too late to reverse this trend – success with the Peregrine Falcon, Brown Pelican, and Bald Eagle prove this – but we need to act soon, and we need to act together. Most migratory birds spend more than half the year south of the U.S. border, so working with our partners across the Americas is essential. For nearly 20 years, we have collaborated with partners in more than 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean via our Monitoring Overwinter Survival (MoSI) program. MoSI uses a standardized protocol to mist net, band, and examine the health of birds, before releasing them unharmed. The strength of the program (and its sister program in North America, MAPS) is the coordinated network of more than 1,000 citizen scientists and professionals working together. The MoSI program is in a period of robust growth, with new stations in Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the Virgin Islands, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina. For our cooperators, the overwhelming majority of which are small, local, non-profits, we provide training and capacity building, micro-grants for the purchase of equipment, and fellowship programs to bring early-career Latin American conservation professionals to the U.S. for collaborative study and professional development. It is often through examining long-term trends that the impacts of climate change and habitat alterations are best understood, and the role of established, geographically-robust data sets like that of the MoSI program cannot be understated. IBP is one of the few non-profit members of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, which had a key role in the 3-billion birds campaign you may have read about (https://www.3billionbirds.org/). More information about MoSI, including a map of current stations, is available at https://birdpop.org/pages/mosi.php. The program benefits conservation scientists looking for answers about the causes of species decline. We also have projects within the program that provide training and capacity building to MoSI cooperators (mostly small, locally-run non-profits) across the Americas, including projects to provide needed supplies and equipment, and a fellowship program for early career Latin American conservation scientists. We are requesting $12,000 to support the MoSI program's Equipment Purchase and Fellowship programs.