National Technical Guide: Biomonitoring

In September of 2014, the USDA Forest Service published a national technical guide for monitoring of wildlife habitat. Mary Rowland (principal investigator) and colleagues from across the nation assembled the work. More information is available at:

https://www.fs.fed.us/research/highlights/highlights_display.php?in_high_id=758

The Edwin James Society has fiercely advocated for the standardization of protocols across ecology in a format similar to human medicine. Uniform application of techniques allows for comparison of data across broad spatial and temporal scales. Medicine has in large part advanced to a highly efficacious discipline due to the ability to assemble and analyze vast catalogs of meta-data. Ecology has been vastly inhibited because of myriad "cottage industry" approaches to protocol development and application.

We encourage everyone to consult this new protocol guide and to the extent possible implement its recommendations.