CATIE is centrally located within an agricultural landscape consisting predominantly of coffee, sugar cane and pasture. Multiple stations have been set up to monitor birds in various types of land use, with little travel time required between them. Land uses currently being monitored include: 1) living fences, 2) coffee agroforestry, 3) sugar cane, 4) cacao agroforestry, 5) forests and 6) abandoned coffee. CATIE lies within the Volcán Turrialba Biological Corridor that forms part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC).

The research project team includes Dr. Fabrice De Clerck, landscape ecologist; Alejandra Martinez Salinas, ornithologist and ecologist; and Rachelle De Clerck, environmental education specialist and biologist.

Data collected during the monitoring program will be critical for understanding the long-term changes in bird populations, both for resident and migratory species, as well as to understanding how land-use change may affect avian communities. To date, most research has focused on how avian communities are affected by the loss of forest, with little research on how changes in land-use practices affect bird conservation. For example, a recent CATIE study has found that coffee agroforestry systems, which are biodiversity friendly, are rapidly being converted to sugar cane plantations as farmers speculate on an increase in ethanol market prices. Long-term bird monitoring of sugar cane and coffee agroforestry systems within the CATIE farm will provide data necessary for understanding the impact of this change on bird conservation.

The CATIE stations aim to protect migratory and resident birds through the generation of knowledge about body condition and use of habitat in different land uses within the CATIE farm. These stations will be incorporated into the Monitoring Overwintering Survival (MoSI) program, which is an initiative of the IBP in  Point Reyes, Calif. This institute has been conducting research on avian productivity survival throughout the United States since 1989. Based on the information generated by this work and others like the BBC (North American Breeding Bird Survey), it is obvious that in spite of all conservation efforts conducted in North America, populations of several migratory bird species are still declining due to adverse conditions in their winter grounds. The awareness of this decline led to creation of the MoSI program, which is a cooperative effort among public agencies, private organizations and independent bird banders in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, to better understand spatial- and habitat-related variation in the overwintering physical condition and survivorship of migratory land birds. To achieve this goal, MoSI relies on data collected between November and March at a network of standardized mist netting and banding stations across the wintering ranges of these species (MoSI Protocol 2007).

Besides being a part of the MoSI program, yearlong monitoring stations will be maintained to generate information about resident birds, their presence and absence, abundance, and body condition in different land uses. Establishing the differences in habitat use by resident birds due to land-use conversion of coffee to sugar cane plantations in the Turrialba region is of particular interest. There is very little known about species abundance and usage of these types of agricultural crops, and it is imperative that we learn how these changes affect the bird species that breed and reside in these areas.