Oregon

We are a collaboration of professionals and citizen scientists dedicated to a high quality, state-wide measurement of the abundance and distribution of Oregon’s birds by the year 2020. Visit the Oregon 2020 website by clicking here.

What is Oregon 2020?

We live on a dynamic planet where changes in land use and climate can produce ecosystem-wide effects. Good stewardship of natural resources depends on high-quality information. Anticipating and managing for future changes in our environment requires benchmark data on today’s distribution and abundance of biodiversity.

We are at a pivotal time when we have the knowledge and resources to produce high-quality measurements of biodiversity and to preserve that information in an easily accessible form.

Our goals include:

•    Establish a state-wide, high-quality measurement of the abundance and distribution of Oregon birds.
•    Use exactly repeatable methods that can be replicated by all scientists from today and into the future.
•    Coordinate collaborative efforts between professional researchers and citizen scientists.
•    Provide volunteer birders and citizen scientists with opportunities to contribute by counting birds and entering observations into eBird.
•    Create a training program to enhance quality of data contributed by volunteers.
•    Collaborate with interested parties to assemble and analyze existing data from established surveys such as the Breeding Bird Survey, Bird Atlas, and Avian Knowledge Northwest.

Our goal is to have a state-wide benchmark of Oregon’s birds by the year 2020. Our data will give future generations the ability to see changes in bird abundance from our time to their’s with “20/20 vision”

Why Birds?

•    Birds are sensitive to environmental change, and can be impacted by habitat changes across their full lifecycle from breeding and wintering grounds to migration routes. Oregon is important for birds all year long.
•    Birds play many valuable ecological roles, so understanding their responses to environmental change is important.
•    Birds are easily detected and relatively inexpensive to monitor.
•    Birds have a wide public appeal thanks to their charismatic appearances and behaviors.

What will the end product look like?

Oregon 2020 will produce a treasure of information on the distribution and abundance of birds in Oregon. We will use modern techniques to map current distributions and abundances of birds, relying heavily on the quality data our field ornithologists and our volunteer network of birders contribute.

We will leave a legacy of data archived in eBird, Avian Knowledge Network, and other global biodiversity databases.

Who we are:

Oregon 2020 is a collaboration of professional ornithologists, citizen scientists, and birding enthusiasts. Here is a short list of the people who have helped to bring Oregon 2020 to life: Douglas Robinson, Tyler Hallman, Jenna Curtis, Randy Moore, Stephanie Caldwell, Liz Johnson, Tyler McFadden, Kerstin Beerweiler, Michael Brawner, Jenae Castanon, ShyAnne Woods, Spencer Mair, and Cody Saywers.

2022 Update:

After counting birds at nearly 11,000 locations across Oregon using professional survey methods and adding more than 40,000 counts from more than 1,100 eBirders, we are ready to analyze data from the Oregon 2020 Birds project. Surveys started in 2011. A decade later we are excited to see what our collective bird counting efforts tell us about Oregon’s birds.

In particular, we will be mapping the breeding season distribution of each species in fine detail. To do so, we link features of the habitat around each of the places we found each species and then determine where each species should occur in the state. To that, we add information about the expected numbers of each species in each habitat. When we add all that information together, we can then estimate the population size of each species in our large state. That’s fun, to be sure, but we also will be able to use the information to inform land managers, policymakers, and conservationists about what fraction of each species’ population lives on different kinds of land ownership. For example, what fraction of White-headed Woodpeckers live on Forest Service versus BLM land? So who should be emphasizing conservation of that species on lands they oversee?

As we complete our statistical models and make our maps in the next couple of years, we will be producing a book with the results, as well as beautiful art and photos of birds. Perhaps even more importantly, all our data are archived in eBird and elsewhere so that anyone decades or centuries from now can repeat our work precisely. They can return to exactly the same places we stood on the same day of the year and same time of day, and count birds again. That’s birding immortality! We look forward to sharing the results with the eBird community.