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Using simple species lists to monitor trends in animal populations: new methods and a comparison with independent data

There is an urgent need to develop simple and inexpensive methods for monitoring wildlife populations in resource‐poor countries. List‐based methods have been advocated as simple yet potentially useful biodiversity monitoring tools, and systems have recently been launched in a number of countries to collect species lists. We attempt to advance the use of systematic list‐based monitoring by (1) suggesting improvements to the way in which list reporting rates are calculated; (2) assessing the extent to which degrading effort‐corrected measures of abundance into simple species lists results in loss of information on population trends; (3) comparing long‐term trends in list reporting rates with population trends from a wholly independent monitoring scheme. Daily species lists of birds were derived from regular trapping at a nature reserve in southern England. Most species showed a strong correlation across years between the proportion of lists on which they occurred, adjusted for list length (adjusted list reporting rate; ALRR), and an effort‐corrected measure of abundance (captures per unit effort; CPUE). ALRR revealed almost as much about annual variation in abundance as CPUE for all but the most frequently captured species. Long‐term (>20 years) trends in ALRRs at the nature reserve were positively correlated with UK national population trends recorded over the same period by an independent, labour‐intensive monitoring scheme that counted birds at a large number of widely spread sites. Our results support previous claims that simple species lists could generate data useful for monitoring long‐term population trends, particularly where such lists are collected systematically. However, further research on the efficiency of list reporting rates relative to more sophisticated methods is necessary, before list‐based methods can be advocated for dedicated monitoring schemes in resource‐poor regions.