2025-09-16 GMAC Minutes Final Draft

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through to 2022 was based on annual, oh sorry...from 1980 all the way to 2024 was based only on the annual surveys that are done typically in January and February. But since 2022, we have started to do quarterly surveys to get a better idea as of where the birds are throughout the year. This paper is looking at the quarterly surveys that are done every January and February and I believe May, August and November, are the four-time period that we do our quarterly survey. So, this paper took that data up and basically try to identify where a Palila hot spot is, so this is kind of the most important...and then, one other thing I will also add is the quarterly data also supported the annual population data and all the numbers were pretty much identical to what they found from the annual survey data. So, this was kind of another way to estimate the population with a smaller sample size. So, according to the quarterly data, what this can show us is where the Palila hotspots are and how they've changed overtime. So, in 2020 you can see, I apologize this is kind of small, they have put a lot of images on one thing, but, basically in 2020 there were two (2) hot spots. One up kind of to the Northeast of Pu'u Mana'o and one (1) down right near the Palila discovery trail, right at kind of by Pu'u La'au. So, since 2020 that hotspot has decreased in size and really concentrated in the Northeast section by Pu'u Mana'o. And...but,just a note to that hotspot didn't change over the last five (5) years, it's pretty much has been that area, since that analysis was looked at. This paper was really good to highlight where the Palila are, possibly important areas on the mountain are for them. This is just to show a little bit more detail into the survey effort that went into estimating these Palila populations for both of these papers, so, from 2022 to 2025, we've surveyed a total of 19 transects and in that time, we've done over 3,000 surveys stations. So that means we've had a biologist at a station surveying these stations for at least six(6) minutes NOTE: Palila (Loxioides bailleui) are critically endangered, finch-billed Hawaiian honeycreepers (family Fringillidae), and the last of the seed specialists in this adaptive radiation remaining within the main Hawaiian Islands. Approximately 2.84 million years ago, palila diverged from the ancestors of the Laysan finch (Telespiza cantans) and Nihoa finch (Telespiza ultima; Lerner et al. 2011), and colonized the dry forests of at least Kauai, Oahu, and the Island of Hawaii (Olson and James 1982, Burney et al. 2001, Banko et al. 2020), based on subfossil and historical evidence.They evolved to feed almost exclusively upon the seed pods of endemic mamane (Sophora chrysophylla;family Fabaceae), which contain compounds toxic to most other species (Banko et al. 2002a). Their dependence on mamane seeds has increased markedly compared to their reconstructed diet showing greater exploitation of caterpillars more than a century ago (Van Houtan et al. 2024). Today, they are found only in subalpine dry forest on the Southwest slope of Mauna Kea, and in that whole time, we detected 663 Palila. And so here is just a little bit more of a breakdown, so in 2022 is when we first started to do the Quarterly survey, so that year we did just 386 stations, which is typical for the annual survey. In 2023 we started doing more of the quarterly survey, we didn't have quite enough biologists to do as many as we would like, so we ended up doing about 880 stations, and in 2024 we were kind of...we 10