Mist net
A 2011 research survey found mist netting to result in low rates of injury while providing high scientific value.
[2] Mist netting is a popular and important tool for monitoring species diversity, relative abundance, population size, and demography.
Although setting up mist nets is time-consuming and requires certification, there are certain advantages compared to visual and aural monitoring techniques, such as sampling species that may be poorly detected in other ways.
Because they allow scientists to examine species up close, mist nets are often used in mark-recapture studies over extended periods of time to detect trends in population indices.
One of the main disadvantages of mist nets is that the numbers captured may only represent a small proportion of the true population size.
[4] Mist netting is a unique method in that it provides demographic estimates throughout all seasons, and offers valuable guides to relative abundance of certain species or birds and/or bats.
[4] Mist nets can be important tools for collecting data to reveal critical ecological conditions in a variety of situations.
[5] Birds surveyed were from a variety of ecological guilds, including nectivores, insectivores, frugivores, obligatory army ant followers, forest edge specialists and flocking species.
Reserves of varied sizes (1 and 10 hectare) within the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments project site were sampled with transects of tethered mist nets once every three or four weeks.
A summary of the results and discussion as stated by Bierregaard and Lovejoy is as follows: ...changes in the understory avian community in isolated patches.
Species of birds that are obligate army ant followers disappeared at the time the surrounding habitat was removed from 1 and 10 ha areas.
Several species of mid-story insectivores changed their foraging behavior after isolation of small forest reserves.These data were collected using mist nets.
Data from mist netting efforts may be used to gain a greater understanding of ecological effects of factors impacting ecosystems, such human activities or environmental changes.
Mist nets will not capture birds in direct proportion to their presence in the area (Remsen and Good 1996) and can miss a species completely if it is active in a different strata of vegetation, such as high in the canopy.
Banders are responsible for the animals caught and thus apply their training by looking for stress cues (for birds, these include panting, tiredness, closing of eyes, and raising of feathers).
