Prioritizing bird conservation actions in the Prairie Hardwood transition of the Midwestern United States

•Bird populations are increasingly constrained by human development and land change.•We modeled tradeoffs between differing grass and forest bird management endpoints.•Achieving forest bird goals will be difficult given competing grassland bird goals.•The level of landscape transition required may be societally unacceptable.•We recommend developing goals for reducing risk of population extirpation.