South America eBird Beta-Testing!

The eBird team is excited to announce that you can now enter data for any location in the Western Hemisphere, including South America and Antarctica! Country lists have been developed for each South American country with the help of our friends at Avibase, and filters have been set to provide quality control and prevent erroneous entries or typographical errors. Taxonomies have been merged so that your lists appear in order. The Google maps tool for plotting your location works just as it does in the United States (although there may be fewer roads and other landmarks to help you find the location!).

So dig out your bird list from your trip to the Galapagos (Ecuador) or Asa Wright Nature Center (Trinidad), to Manu National Park (Peru) or Torres del Paine National Park (Chile), or from wherever you have been birding on the world's birdiest continent (South America) or its most birdless (Antarctica). And please note that our recent release of the bulk upload tool now makes it easier than ever to upload your old data; read more here.

We still consider this a beta testing stage for South America so please let us know about any errors you encounter. There are some elements of the functionality of the program that run more smoothly in North America than in South America and we will be attending to these over the coming weeks and months.

For now, what we'd most appreciate is for people to test out data entry and to build up our South American database. Were any species missing from the checklist page (but please read "South American taxonomy" below)? Did you receive rarity confirmation messages for species that made sense? Or were you asked to confirm common species and allowed to enter globally rare species that eBird did not ask for confirmation on? The checklists you see on the data entry page are usually general countrywide checklists, so regional specificity is lacking at this point.

Please suggest hotspots too, especially for well-known birding locations that you have visited. However, anytime you suggest a hotspot in eBird, PLEASE DO TRY TO BE SURE THAT YOUR HOTSPOT HAS NOT ALREADY BEEN RECOMMENDED. It is a real challenge for us to remove duplicate hotspots, so it is much better if you take the time to make sure your hotspot is not already plotted, by first checking the map using the "Find it on a map" tool" in eBird and clicking on the red stickpins to see the hotspot name.

We are really excited about our movement to the south and look forward to seeing the data flow in. Read on to understand more about our South American data entry and how you can help us when you travel.

First, an acknowledgment

Before we go any further we owe a huge debt of thanks to to Denis Lepage of Bird Studies Canada. Denis has been a critical partner for us at eBird. In his spare time, while not working on conservation and database issues for Bird Studies Canada, Denis maintains one of the world's premier birding websites: Avibase.

Avibase has been Denis' labor of love for 15+ years and it shows. Building off of a database of world taxonomy for both species and subspecies, Avibase provides regional bird lists for all the countries of the world, plus many islands, states, provinces, and other regions. These can be viewed in several languages and several different taxonomic authorities. Avibase also archives over 13,000 trip reports from regions all around the world in an easily searchable archive. The birding links available through Avibase are phenomenal and this should be the top bookmark in any birder?s web browser.

The country lists that form the baseline checklists on the data entry page all came directly from Avibase, with gracious permission from Denis. This would have taken us weeks or months of work to do ourselves, and Denis' willingness to share his hard work on this project has been monumentally helpful to eBird's development. Please check out Avibase and make it a regular stop on your internet browsing route for bird information.

South American Partnerships

The team at eBird is actively pursuing partnerships in South America that will provide local management and promotion of the eBird movement in their country. We hope these partnerships will help to make eBird a powerful tool for conservation and science in South America just as it is becoming in North America. If you know of groups that might be interested in working with eBird, please put them in touch with us.

Lodges

We believe that eBird will prove to be an incredibly useful tool at ecolodges throughout the Western Hemisphere, and in South and Central America in particular. Visiting birders are always interested in the possible bird species that can be seen when visiting a given lodge. Often these sightings are recorded in a logbook or notebook. These logbooks can provide interesting reading but provide no system for organizing their sightings.

We encourage eBirders visiting renowned ecolodges in South America to help us with three things:

1) Please enter your bird lists for the lodge to begin recording the bird history from the location. If you can enter effort information along with your bird list you will add value to your observations; click here here to read why.

2) Check on the map to see if the location is already an eBird hotspot. If not, please be sure to click "Add this location as a hotspot" when entering your bird list. If you do this, then your sightings will join those of other birders so that the bird sighting record for the lodge can be explored using "View and Explore Data" in eBird. Please note that sometimes google map coverage for the lodge region may be poor or may be covered in clouds, which may make it difficult to plot the location correctly. It is highly advisable to try to get the latitude and longitude (to at least four decimal places or to at least the nearest second) of the lodge from a handheld GPS, from the lodge owners, or from a topo map.

3) Please touch base with the lodge owners and local guides and naturalists to tell them about eBird and about the reasons above for why it would benefit them to use the program and to encourage their guests to use the program. Feel free to put the lodge personnel in touch with us at eBird@cornell.edu.

Refinement

Over the next year we plan to revise our South American filters to be more region-specific given the widely different avifauna within countries (on the east and west side of the Andes mountains, for example). Please contact us at eBird@cornell.edu if you have the expertise and willingness to assist us with this undertaking.

South American taxonomy

Before you email us about a species missing from the entry checklist, please make sure we are reading off the same page. Your missing species may simply have a different name on our checklist.

The complexity of bird populations in South America has resulted in widely varied bird lists for the continent, which is known for having the most diverse avifauna (more than 3254 species) of any continent. Until recently, the absence of an agreed-upon authority meant that authors of prominent field guides needed to each make their own taxonomic decisions. Thus, the species lists for the same region might be wildly different depending on the chosen taxonomy and each author's personal definition of what constitutes a species.

A recent eBird story discussed the eBird taxonomy (click here for more). The foundation for this taxonomy is a merger of the bird lists for North America and South America that are maintained by the American Ornithologists' Union. The North American Classification Committee (NACC) is the committee most familiar to North American birders; this group published the 7th edition of the AOU Check-list and the seven supplements since. Perhaps less familiar is the recently-formed South American Classification Committee (SACC) classification and taxonomy. First released in 2005, the SACC taxonomy finally provides a single, recognized authority on the classification and taxonomy of birds on this continent. It is a living taxonomy, with regular updates occurring at least once a month as the committee reaches consensus on new proposals. The SACC uses the same process as the NACC, and although the SACC and NACC are not in perfect agreement, they do agree in most cases. Where they disagree, the committees are each reconsidering their decisions to try to bring the two committees more in line with one another. Given the consistent treatment, regular updates, and ease of merging with the NACC list, it was a no-brainer for eBird to follow the SACC.

It may take some research to match the species names from prominent field guides with the SACC taxonomy. However, as new guides are published, more and more are likely to follow the SACC classification (e.g., Birds of Peru). Ultimately, we plan to provide a chart showing the names from popular field guides and how they connect to the names used by eBird. If you are willing to help with this project please contact us at eBird@cornell.edu.

View and explore data

If you try to go to the "View and Explore data" tab to check out the distribution of something like Superciliaried Hemispingus or Agile Tit-Tyrant, you may notice that the map you get does not include more than the northern sliver of South America. At this point, we do not have enough South American data to make it worthwhile to provide a new map interface. (We do plan to change this in the future as the data pile up.) However, it is still possible to use the "Change location" feature to explore the data submitted from each country individually, for example, the below map shows Blue-gray Tanager reports in Venezuela.

As this is one of the most common birds in northern South America, this map is clearly in its infancy. This is exactly why every piece of your data is so important--even of the common birds! South America is essentially a blank slate for eBirders to fill in. Some excellent new field guides (e.g., those for Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador) provide detailed range maps not previously available for South American countries, but accurate range maps covering the entire continent are yet to be drawn (and may never be drawn given the remoteness of much of that continent). eBird provides an opportunity for observational data to inform our rapidly growing understanding of bird distribution on the continent and to help fill some of the remaining gaps in our knowledge. Seasonal occurrence is likewise not well understood for many species. Austral migration within South America, as well as elevational movements and other avian responses to drought and or fruiting cycles, provides great opportunity for increased understanding and data gathered by birders can make a major contribution here.

Final thoughts on coverage

eBird hit a recent milestone with the submission in December of the one-millionth checklist (read more). As excited as we are, we believe we have a more important milestone in right around the corner--completion of coverage in the United States.

Try using "View and explore data" to check out the distribution of your favorite North American bird species. The map you will see ranges from Panama to arctic Canada and Alaska, and with be a patchwork of light yellow overlain by gray squares; those with observations of the bird in question are colored in shades of green. These squares are on a 100 x 100 km grid and we are proud and excited to say that we have observations for every grid cell in the lower 48 states EXCEPT FOR SEVEN. You can see these cells on the maps--one is in northeastern Nebraska; three in northern South Dakota and one in southern North Dakota; one in eastern Montana; and one in eastern Oregon. Not sure where to bird next weekend? Try heading for these squares and submitting some eBird checklists! Don't live in one of these states? Try looking at your state map and identifying a region in your state with sparse data. No state has perfectly uniform coverage and we consider it most important to get checklists from new, uncovered areas. Every checklist from these regions is precious and helps us understand bird occurrence at finer and finer scales.