Point-count bird censusing: long-term monitoring of bird abundance and diversity in central Arizona-Phoenix, ongoing since 2000

### project overview Over the past half-century, the greater Phoenix metropolitan area (GPMA) has been one of the fastest growing regions in the US, experiencing rapid urban expansion in addition to urban intensification. This backdrop provides an ideal setting to monitor biodiversity changes in response to urbanization, and the CAP LTER has been using a standardized point-count protocol to monitor the bird community in the GPMA and surrounding Sonoran desert region since 2000. The bird survey locations in this CAP LTER core monitoring program include six general site groupings: 1. ESCA. Forty bird survey locations were selected from a subset of the CAP LTER's Ecological Survey of Central Arizona (ESCA; formerly named Survey200) long-term monitoring sites. ESCA sites were located using a tessellation-stratified dual-density sampling design, and, as such, span a diversity of habitats including urban, suburban, rural, commercial areas, parks, agricultural fields, and native Sonoran desert. Earlier versions of this data package included data from the ESCA project that was intended to complement the bird data. However, while positioned in close proximity, the bird survey locations do not necessarily overlap with the 30m x 30m plot that constitutes an ESCA sampling location, and leveraging data from these two monitoring programs should be addressed carefully. ESCA data have corresponding survey location names, and those data are available through the CAP LTER and LTER network data portals. At the conclusion of the 2016 spring survey, fifteen of the ESCA-correlated sites were discontinued as the core monitoring program refocused its efforts on desert parks and PASS neighborhoods. Among the deleted locations were all agricultural and commercial sites, as well as sites where access had become restrictive. 2. North Desert Village (NDV). Additional bird survey locations were positioned in treatment areas of the North Desert Village (NDV). This was a site of intense study on t