March Atlas Challenge

1st March means that we wrap up the Summer season, and roll in to the Autumn Atlas season!

March is the first month of the Atlas Autumn season, and this is a key time for the project. The previous Autumn seasons have been affected by national lockdowns to help with COVID-19, and therefore the spatial coverage has been, understandably, lower. With the current situation allowing far more freedom in our movements, a key goal of this Autumn will be going into as many grid squares as possible to increase the coverage. The Atlas Effort Map will be a key tool here for you (but not the only one!) to see what areas are undersurveyed and need some much needed birding in them. With all of that in mind, this month’s Atlas challenge will be focused on increasing spatial coverage!

During March one lucky Atlaser has the chance to win a free one year’s subscription to Birds of the World by simply contributing to the New Zealand Bird Atlas eBird portal. The winner will be randomly drawn from everyone who qualifies and announced at the beginning of April 2022.

To qualify, all you have to do is submit complete checklists to 5 grid squares in the Atlas eBird portal during the month of March. Every 5 unique grid squares you enter data into gives you one entry into the draw, so if you submit data to 10 unique grid squares your name goes in twice, 15 unique grid squares gets you 3 entries etc. These checklists must include counts for every species reported (no X’s!) and should follow the best practices outlined here

Diurnal Effort Hours in Autumn for South Island

This prize allows you to have access to a fantastic resource for a year to support your Atlasing, birding and general knowledge of the world’s avifauna. So hop on your bike, in your car, or on public transport and try get in to as many grid squares as possible within the month. It goes without saying but please adhere to local, regional and national COVID protective measures. Stay safe and have fun out there!

Many thanks again to the Birds of the World and eBird team for kindly donating this prize for a lucky Atlaser to win.

Birds of the World is a powerful resource that brings deep, scholarly content from four celebrated works of ornithology into a single platform where biologists and birders can find comprehensive life history information on birds. Every bird has a story. Discover them all with Birds of the World. This free one year subscription will unlock species accounts, maps, multimedia, and bird family overviews for you to explore and enjoy.

For this challenge we really recommend utilising the many tools at your disposal in the Explore tab. The Atlas Effort Map is always the best place to start finding where you can target undersurveyed squares. Additional tools that are of immense benefit are Species Maps, Target Species, using the mapping files to see where Atlasers have surveyed, as well as having the Atlas grid in your pocket so you know how close you are to other squares. Finally, our final lockdown webinar from last year went through Atlas planning and is a great start to review how to plan surveying a square.

Dirunal Effort Hours in Autumn for the North Island

Don’t forget that the number of individuals observed is one of the most valuable aspects of your checklists. Reporting accurate counts in your complete checklists significantly raises their scientific value, helping researchers understand not just where birds are, but how many there are as well. This information is essential for tracking changes in bird populations over time through relative abundance modelling to produce modelled outputs like the ones on the eBird Science tab.

As always, let us know how you are getting on with the Atlas challenge, feel free to share your Atlasing adventures on social media or send us an email, we’re always keen to hear how you’re getting on.

Happy Atlasing!