State of eBird - 2009

Perhaps you're a 'hardcore' birder, submitting dozens of checklists a week, pouring over the Top 100 reports, and itching to find the latest arriving migrant in your region. Or maybe you're more casual in your approach, getting out birding now and then, or maybe just in the backyard--but still contributing your observations to eBird each time you go birding. Both types of birder, and every level in between, can take pride in knowing that they've helped push eBird forward in 2009. Your efforts do not go unnoticed at eBird, and your data are being appreciated by science now more than ever.

With all these data and more than five years of progress under our belt, 2009 was the time to see what science could do with it. We published our first peer-reviewed paper in the journal Biological Conservation (Sullivan et al. 2009), highlighting how eBird data could be used to help conserve birds and biodiversity. We then created the ‘eBird Reference Dataset’, available through the Avian Knowledge Network, that enables scientific researchers to access raw eBird data in more useful ways (Munson et al. 2009). Several scientific publications already have arisen from this dataset, including a pioneering statistical methodology paper that predicts when and where birds will occur across vast landscapes—all based on eBird (Fink et al. 2010). This technique has tremendous implications for predicting how birds occur in regions where few people live, as well as for improving our ability to monitor and track large-scale changes in bird populations in the face of climate change.

On the development side we launched several new features to engage the birding community, including the ‘eBird Alerts’ system which compares your bird lists against new reports coming into eBird, and then lets you know about any potential new birds for you in a particular region. We also created a series of 'eBird APIs' that allow outside developers to access streams of eBird data, increasing the utility of eBird and making it available for tools like the recently launched 'BirdsEye' iPhone application. Perhaps more importantly, we spent much of 2009 solidifying our database infrastructure so that eBird can continue its phenomenal growth, and truly become a worldwide project.

In addition to continuing to develop tools that engage the birding community and broaden eBird's general use and appeal, our primary goal for 2010 is to make eBird available worldwide. Birders from all over the world will soon be able to contribute observations to the project, and our current users will be able to enter checklists from trips abroad. This unified global bird monitoring system will have tremendous value and conservation impact in the future. While we will continue to meet the needs of the birding community through eBird development, we will not lose our focus on science, and making your data available for the ongoing protection of birds and biodiversity.

Thanks for all your help and dedication to eBird over the years (and a special thanks to all eBird editors and volunteers who work tirelessly to manage the database locally); we truly appreciate all your efforts! If you value eBird as much as we do, please consider making a donation to help support our project this year.

Good Birding,

Team eBird--Brian Sullivan, Chris Wood, Marshall Iliff 

References

Fink, D., Hochachka, W. M., Zuckerberg, B., Winkler, D. W., Shaby, B., Munson, M. Arthur, Hooker, G. J., Riedewald, M., Sheldon, D., Kelling, S.  2010. Spatiotemporal Exploratory models for Large-scale Survey Data. Ecological Applications (in press).

M. Arthur Munson, Kevin Webb, Daniel Sheldon, Daniel Fink, Wesley M. Hochachka, Marshall Iliff, Mirek Riedewald, Daria Sorokina, Brian Sullivan, Christopher Wood, and Steve Kelling. The eBird Reference Dataset, Version 1.0. Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, Ithaca, NY, June 2009. < http://www.avianknowledge.net/content/features/archive/eBird_Ref/>

Sullivan, B.L., C.L. Wood, M.J. Iliff, R.E. Bonney, D. Fink, and S. Kelling. 2009. eBird: a citizen-based bird observation network in the biological sciences. Biological Conservation 142: 2282-2292.