Members receive three issues per year of Ornitologia Neotropical, a refereed journal accepting original research papers in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Fixed-radius point counts are conducted by counting all birds detected within a given radius of an observer. As with the fixed-width transect method, only a single distance needs to be estimated. A larger radius allows more birds to be detected, but the less conspicuous species are undersampled. Again, the distance selected should be based on the detectability of birds within the habitat studied.
Researchers often use multiple radius bands for detecting birds.
However, this requires more extensive analyses. The major shortcoming of fixed-radius point counts is that density cannot be calculated. The unit of measure is simply the number of birds detected per point count. Many of the identifications reported in the SCBA are tentative in nature.