We used the United States National Grid to develop a sampling grid for monitoring programs in the Great Plains Landscape Conservation Cooperative, delineated by Bird Conservation Regions 18 and 19. Landscape Conservation Cooperatives are science based partnerships with the goal to inform and guide conservation at regional landscape levels. Developing a standardized sampling grid for a LCC is a new endeavor and is designed to reduce program costs, avoid repetition in sampling, and increase efficiency in monitoring programs. This is possible because the grid’s nationwide coverage, uniform starting point, and scalability allow researchers to expand their monitoring programs from a small, local level to a regional or even national level. We modified the grid slightly; cells along Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) zone junctions are irregular in size and shape. In order to retain the grid’s scalability and avoid sampling grids smaller than 1 kilometer square we merged the small, irregular cells with their adjacent cells.
