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!

Montana Bird
Records Committee