Founded in 1967, the Georgia Conservancy is one of the oldest environmental nonprofits in the state, with a rich history of working with private citizens, business, government, and academia to protect and conserve the state's natural resources. The Conservancy’s mission is to protect Georgia through ecological and economic solutions for stewardship, conservation and sustainable use of the land and its resources.

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About this Partner Project

Georgia Conservancy is a proud partner of the Burning for Birds Conservation Collaborative where we work with private landowners across the Georgia Sentinel Landscape (GSL), promoting growing season (Feb-Aug) prescribed fires to manage and maintain bird habitat indicative of pine/savanna ecosystems. Prescribed fire is an affordable management tool used by private landowners and is common for maintaining pine and hardwood forests across Georgia. This project uses funding from the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Burning for Birds Collaborative to purchase acoustic recording devices to detect target bird species after growing season fires across the GSL.

Using Autonomous Recording Units (ARU), we are recording bird vocalizations in the morning and evening, targeting loggerhead shrike, brown-headed nuthatch, Bachman’s sparrow, and northern bobwhite. We have 10 ARU’s on 5 pine forest properties across the Coastal Plain of Georgia, each deployed around different burn schedules.

Photo: An Autonomous Recording Unit (ARU) deployed on private lands.

We are collaborating with Birds Georgia to bring bird enthusiasts to private lands, making lands otherwise inaccessible to the public, available for a field day. Furthermore, we are engaging citizen scientists and promoting the benefits of growing season prescribed fire as a management tool to the greater public. To better communicate these Best Management Practices, we are planning 3 outreach events across the GSL that will allow the public to engage in citizen science and learn more about growing season prescribed fires.

Working together with the Burning for Birds Collaborative, the Georgia Conservancy is helping to promote the benefits of growing season prescribed fires while using private landowners as a model to encourage citizen science. This project would not be possible without support from the Cornell Ornithology Lab, Burning for Birds Collaborative, Birds Georgia, and our private landowners. We hope to replicate this project into future monitoring projects, promoting citizen science and private landowner collaboration.