Over the past few millennia, human-caused habitat change has had one of the most profound effects on bird populations globally, especially since industrialization in the 1800s. Looking forward, we can expect human-caused habitat loss to represent the greatest threat to many North American breeding birds.
Your bird sightings can influence more than just the birding and conservation worlds. eBird checklists are a quintessential example of 'Big Data'—a massive dataset, chock full of patterns, that contains myriad opportunities to explore exciting questions in fields like statistics or machine learning.
At eBird, our goal is to connect valuable birdwatcher sightings with research and conservation. The eBird checklists that you've entered have been used in over 100 peer-reviewed papers, and hundreds of local, regional, and national conservation decisions.
Every observation you submit to eBird is valuable, and with roughly 400 million records gathered so far, eBird has grown into one of the premier information sources on bird occurrence and abundance around the world. Importantly, eBird data are curated, managed, and made freely available for education, research, and conservation use, and tens of thousands of people download eBird data each year.
Allen’s Hummingbird has been placed on several conservation watchlists, as breeding bird surveys indicating population declines have spurred concerns that climate change may push it out of Southern California. However, local birdwatchers have reported at the same time that the non-migratory subspecies of Allen’s Hummingbird, once restricted to the Channel Islands, is now a common sight at feeders in Riverside and Los Angeles.