The
Montana Natural Heritage Program (MNHP)
developed the Tracker web site in order to better meet its statutory responsibility
of acquisition, storage, and retrieval of information documenting Montana’s
flora, fauna and biological communities. The Tracker web site hosting
and the base geographic information are supplied by the Montana
Natural
Resource Information System at the
Montana
State Library.
Tracker serves up information on over 100,000 nonbird
animal observations in the Point Observation Database (POD) and over 400,000
bird records in the Montana Bird Distribution (MBD) Database. In
the early 1990's MNHP created POD to manage information on all animal
species in order to identify species of concern and provide resource managers
information that would allow them to prevent needless declines. In the
early 2000's the
Montana Department of Fish,
Wildlife, and Parks began development of a statewide Comprehensive
Fish and Wildlife Conservation Strategy (CFWCS) and began playing an active
role in gathering and contributing vertebrate animal observations to POD
in order to assess the status and conservation needs of vertebrate species.
MNHP also began housing the Montana Bird Distribution (MBD) Database in
the early 1990s as part of the MBD partnership with
Montana
Audubon, the
Montana
Bird Records Committee, and the Montana Department of Fish Wildlife
and Parks. Hundreds of professional biologists and amateur animal enthusiasts
have provided thousands of animal observation records to the POD and MBD
databases over the years, including a contribution of over 260,000 bird
observation records gathered by the
Avian
Science Center at the University of Montana.
The display of information on the Tracker web site is based on a history
of viewing animal distribution and status information in a latitude and
longitude grid system pioneered by Dr. Palmer David Skaar in his
Montana
Bird Distribution Book Series which began in 1975. Dr. Skaar, a Microbial
Geneticist at
Montana State University,
probably did more than any other individual to further the study of birds
in Montana and numerous individuals and organizations have used versions
of his latitude and longitude system to track the status and distribution
of a variety of animal species in Montana. The Tracker web site honors
this tradition by showing distributions of Montana's animals in grid cells
representing 1/4 of a degree of latitude by 1/4 degree of longitude (an
area equivalent to that covered by four 1:24,000 scale topographic maps)
and in the context of an unprecedented access to a variety of statewide
map information. The web site allows individuals to enter animal observations
online in order to contribute the understanding of their status and distribution.
Thank you for your interest in tracking the distribution and status of
Montana's animals and please keep your observations coming!
