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Oregon Prioritization package for expanding the Motus network in the Pacific Flyway

Addressing survival and movement of priority migratory avian species of concern along the Pacific Flyway is paramount for their conservation. Yet, the migratory life stage is understudied in many avian species. The Motus radiotelemetry receiver network is an established system for tracking survival and movement of avian species. This network is an international collaborative that successfully identifies stopover site duration, connected migratory routes, post-fledging dispersal and survival, and adult survival and fidelity on a landscape-scale; parameters that cannot be easily estimated using non-tagged birds. While the Motus network is highly connected in eastern North America, the western part of the continent is lagging in coverage and connectivity, limiting the ability to obtain sample sizes large enough to robustly model demographic parameters from tagged birds. Thus, the expansion of the Motus network is a high priority for Pacific Flyway State Agencies. To date, no method exists for determining priority locations for new Motus receiving stations. With collaborations from States and the Canadian Province of British Columbia, we used eBird citizen scientist data to prioritize strategic locations for new Motus receiving stations throughout the Pacific Flyway. We model priority species’ co-occupancy of varying abundance states (i.e., absent, present, abundant, abundant in multiple weeks) with spatially varying Landsat (red and near infrared), water, land cover types, and weather covariates while accounting for variable detection with temporally varying survey effort covariates. Using occupancy model predictions, we identify high-use areas of the Pacific Flyway for establishing new Motus receiving towers that have high probabilities of intercepting high presence and /or abundance of multiple species of interest in a series of predictive occupancy maps. This package contains all data used to model high occurrence of multiple priority species as well as predictive m