If you had access to practically everything published about a species at the touch
of a button and it was organized in a simple, tabular format... how would you use
it? This is the question and challenge we face as peer-reviewed literature becomes
better accessible via the Internet. American Bird Conservancy and the North Carolina
Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit are exploring ways to utilize published studies
of species' vital population rates and density estimates within a spatially-explicit
framework. One important component to this project is the development of a user
friendly database to permit the distilling of text summaries into standardized data
tables for purposes of meta-analysis. Each database record can be queried for
information describing a study's date and location, method of data collection,
species studied, land cover types and landscape relationships (e.g., patch size,
distance to water), as well as qualitative descriptions of habitat suitability and
quantitative demographic parameters (e.g., density, daily nest survival) under those
conditions. We provide examples of how spatially-explicit rate and density estimates
can be stratified by different attributes and lumped for use in statistical analyses
and mapping applications.