In the northern Great Plains, both private and public wetlands still are very productive and contribute to the continent's waterfowl population. They also provide necessary migration and breeding habitats for numerous nongame birds.
Refuge wetlands, consequently, have become more valuable to faunal communities.
Considerably less information is available for birds in wetlands than in upland habitats. Edwards et al. This was a technique that estimated the distance of each detected bird in 10-m concentric bands extending away from the observer, and it accounted for a greater number of species and greater occurrences of uncommon species than other methods, they reported. We used a semicircular plot with a fixed radius of 75 m. Semicircular plots were easier to use than centering an observer in a homogeneous stand of emergent Typha spp which often were over 2 meters above water surface.