The ngpn consist of 13 national park units located throughout the dakotas eastern wyoming and nebraska

Landbirds are an important component of the northern great plains and good indicators of the effects of local and regional changes. As a result landbirds were identified as one of the ngpn s priority vital signs to be monitored on a long term basis. Long term monitoring of bird populations will provide park unties with the information needed to protect and manage this valuable natural resource. The ngpn is implementing the sampling design developed for a regional bird monitoring program integrated monitoring in bird conservation regions (imbcr white ET AL. 2012) at the ngpn parks. The multiscale imbcr design consists of nested strata with each individual stratum (i.e. park) producing its own estimates of species densities and occupancy rates as well as contributing to estimates for higher order strata such as states and bird conservation regions. The imbcr design defines the sampling unit as a 1 KM2 cell containing 16 evenly spaced sample points with 250 meters spacing between points.