Land managers face increasing pressure to balance demands for recreation with resource stewardship, including wildlife conservation. Negative recreation impacts on wildlife are well documented, but limited knowledge of underlying mechanisms hinders informed management. We evaluated the effects of recreation on bird communities on two recent projects. One project evaluated public lands in western Colorado, including USFS and BLM lands, in conjunction with Colorado Parks and Wildlife. We used a hierarchical community abundance model to analyze 2021–2023 Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions (IMBCR) data to evaluate recreation impacts on public lands in Colorado. We related avian abundance and diversity with recreation infrastructure (i.e., trails and roads) and leveraged anonymized cell phone data to estimate the mechanistic contributions of human traffic to these relationships. The other project focused on evaluating recreation locally on City of Fort Collins Natural Areas. Protected areas along the Front Range have high conservation value as they contain some of the last remaining intact, high-quality shortgrass prairie and foothills shrublands. With increasing pressure to create and sustain high-quality recreational experiences within these open spaces, City of Fort Collins Natural Areas managers must balance between conservation and recreation objectives. Monitoring wildlife responses to recreation can help guide management, but studies often focus narrowly on common species, limiting their utility for broader conservation objectives. This project examined how recreational activities potentially impact the occurrence and richness of breeding bird communities within Natural Areas. Using 15 years of monitoring data, we employed a hierarchical multi-species occupancy model to assess bird responses to recreation across six properties managed by the Fort Collins Natural Areas Department. The analysis considered key recreation attributes, including activity type (e.g., dog walking), intensity (visitor frequency), and trail characteristics such as trail density. Bird responses were evaluated at both single-species and group levels, focusing on four focal species groups: human commensal, shrubland, grassland, and non-native species. This presentation will provide details on how these studies were conducted and how results were generated. We offer practical management recommendations relevant to open spaces and public lands across Colorado, while discussing study limitations and proposing directions for future research.

Experience Level: Intermediate