The Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship program is designed according to the 1998 MAPS Manual by David F. Desante and Kenneth M. Burton, The Institute for Bird Populations.
The LSLBO operates four MAPS sites in the boreal forest. In terms of passerines and other small landbirds, MAPS is the only avian monitoring program that offers survivorship estimates on adult birds as well as productivity indices at the landscape level.
Without this critical data, it’s difficult to determine to what extent deforestation and forest fragmentation on the temperate breeding grounds, versus that on the tropical wintering grounds, are causes for changes in populations of neotropical migrants.
MAPS also provides data on the demographics of the population since it involves catching and banding the birds on their breeding grounds as opposed to just counting them as other programs such as The Breeding Bird Survey, the Breeding Bird Census, and the Christmas Bird Count do.