Understanding the eBird maps

If you are unfamiliar with the eBird maps we encourage you to play with them under 'View and Explore Data'. Below we give some more information on how these maps are generated.

The green shading gives an indication of how often a species is reported in different regions. The darkest shading means that the species is reported on more than 50% of checklists. The palest green shading is used when the species is detected on less than 2% of checklists. Gray areas show areas where we have eBird data, but the the species has not been reported.

The beige map background shows areas where no checklists have been submitted to eBird. CAUTION: Note that eBird maps will not resemble your field guide maps in these blank areas, with northern Canada, central Mexico, and Nicaragua being particularly sparse regions. We hope someday to not have any beige space left and we would LOVE to get any checklists from these blank regions.

These maps only can be generated from eBird reports that include complete checklists--checklists that report ALL species detected and identified on that outing. Otherwise, we have no way of knowing whether a species you didn't report actually wasn't there, or you just didn't report it. The one exception to this is that we will shade a box in the lightest color green if we have no other reports from that 100 x 100 km grid cell. This allows us to include some noteworthy historical records where we don't have effort information. We encourage you to report complete checklists of birds and enter them as stationary counts, traveling counts or area searches--we can do a lot more with these kinds of counts.