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Fill in the gaps--bird the road less traveled (May 2012)

May 9, 2012
Fill in the gaps--bird the road less traveled (May 2012)

Visualization of eBird checklist submissions for May. By Tom Auer.

eBirders often email us and ask where they should go birding in order to make the biggest impact in regions with little data. It's perhaps little surprise that eBird checklist submissions are most dense in areas with large human populations, so getting away from those areas is a good first step for filling in the data gaps in eBird. But seeing these gaps can be really astonishing, and with the help of map wizards Paul Hurtado and Tom Auer, we've come up with a few neat ways to visualize eBird data density at the county level. These maps are a visualization of the total number of eBird checklists submitted in each US county in the month of May across all years, or the total number of checklists per square mile of county area--a better way to see data density in states with large counties. So find a county that has sparse data, and then go do as many eBird checklists as you can there this May!

Click on the link below to view maps for your state:

May 2012 checklists/county interactive map (counties with zero checklists in red)

May 2012 checklists/county area interactive map

May 2012 static state maps

May 2012 checklists/county area static maps


Past month's maps

April 2012 static state maps

April 2012 interactive state maps

April 2012 checklists/county static maps

April 2012 checklists/county interactive maps

March 2012 static state maps

March 2012 interactive state maps

March 2012 checklists/county static maps

March 2012 checklists/county interactive maps

February 2012 state maps

February 2012 checklists/county area maps

January 2012 state maps

In an ideal world eBird would have very densely-spaced data points being sampled repeatedly across the landscape. But we know birders aren't evenly distributed out there, and getting off the beaten path can be a challenge. We hope these maps help show you where eBird needs more data, and where your birding effort can make a bigger impact on our ability to model birds in your county.

Bird distribution changes with the seasons, and at eBird we like to have data distributed throughout the year to track the ebb and flow of bird populations. With this in mind, we plan to update these maps each month so that eBirders will have a better idea about how the data volume changes in each state and county. Check back to see the maps for March around the 1st of the month.

Thanks to Paul Hurtado (static maps) and Tom Auer (interactive maps) for helping visualize these data.

--Team eBird