Surveys of Forest Birds on Puerto Rico, 2015

The island of Puerto Rico supports a diverse assemblage of breeding birds, including 16 endemic species (Raffaele et al. 1998), and provides critical wintering habitat for many North American migratory birds (Wunderle and Waide 1994). Despite being a hotspot of avian biodiversity, spatially extensive data on the distribution and abundance of birds on the island are scarce. Breeding-bird assemblages were sampled by the North American Breeding Bird Survey from 1997–2007 (Sauer et al. 2013), but comparable primary data are not available for bird assemblages present during the boreal winter.

We provide data from one of the few spatially extensive surveys of forest birds on Puerto Rico. We sampled 211 locations in forests across the island during January–March 2015 using repeated point-count surveys. These data are suitable for use in estimating abundance, occupancy, and distribution of forest birds on Puerto Rico during the winter.