Final Report: Lake County Forest Preserve District Bird Surveys

At the Lake County Forest Preserve sites, located in northeastern Illinois, relatively small (e.g. < 10 acre) units within various forest community types (e.g. northern flatwoods, mesic forests, dry mesic oak woodlands) are being managed to promote oak woodland habitat and to demote the presence of invasive exotic plants in the understory. The active management on the site, including light to moderate canopy thinning, creation of canopy gaps, understory plant removal, and invasive-exotic plant species eradication, lends itself to obtaining before-after-treatment-control data at a management scale likely to affect the breeding bird community. Our primary objective was to use a monitoring framework (with replication) at locations within the Lake County Forest Preserve (106 established bird survey points) to document the immediate and longer-term effects of forest management on populations of forest and woodland-dwelling songbirds.