eBird Annual Report 2008

We have seen some great developments at eBird in 2008. Here are some of the highlights:

• eBirders submitted more checklists and observations than in any previous year, including over 1,000,000 observations in a single month!
• eBirders submitted more effort-based observations (traveling, stationary and area counts) than ever before, which greatly increases the utility of their data from a scientific standpoint.  These increased from roughly 35% during the first three years to 65% in 2008.
• We expanded eBird to allow data entry for any location in the Western Hemisphere as well as New Zealand.
• In conjunction with local partners we developed regional eBird portals for Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Guatemala, New Zealand and the entire Caribbean.
• We released bulk data upload procedures that allow users to import data from Excel and personal birding software. Several commercial birding software companies (Avisys, BirdBase and Pocket Bird Recorder) have written code to use this upload process to allow their users to contribute data to eBird.
• We launched 'checklist sharing', a feature that allows a group of birders to 'share' a single checklist for a birding outing.  This will greatly expand the eBird audience by allowing field trip leaders and others to share checklists with people who do not yet use eBird. This will also increase the quality of eBird data by avoiding duplication of data entry.
• We developed and launched new mapping tools that allow people to better manage personal locations and hotspots.
• We developed a way for users to document sightings of rare species by uploading photographs to Flickr. These then show up on the eBird home page and can be searched by anyone.
• We launched several 'data feeds' that resulted in neat applications like the 'Rare Bird Google Gadget' and Jack Siler's Birding on the Net 'eBird Rarity Map'.
  

In 2009 we plan for another banner year.  We'll continue to develop eBird into a better tool for birders.  Some of the ideas we plan to pursue are: improving the listing capabilities on the My eBird pages, building a more visible community around eBird by letting users connect with each other, expanding our geographic scope to allow data entry worldwide, and improving our ability to provide data to the birding and scientific community through innovative data feeds that will allow near real time output of bird records. We also plan a series of back-end updates that will give editors more powerful tools to improve and maintain data quality.

Maintaining and developing eBird requires substantial financial resources.  If you enjoy eBird, please consider making a donation. Every bit helps!

We'd like to extend a big thanks to all our coworkers on Team eBird. Without their hard work, vision, expertise and dedication, eBird simply could not exist: