The Next Steps
The Atlas has finished, and what an incredible effort from the community!
So, many of you might be thinking, now what? Do we just hang up our binoculars and wait for the next Atlas? Far from it! We strongly encourage you, the community, to take on the following four key recommendations.
We wish for you to see this third Birds New Zealand Atlas as a solid platform to take a big step forward in our efforts and galvanise as many passionate birders as possible, to continue to support the national eBird dataset in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Please ensure all checklists that you wish to contribute towards the Atlas are uploaded by the end of July 2024!
We encourage you to upload any checklists retrospectively and promptly. If you have large 5MBC datasets, or other bird observations that you need a hand uploading, please get in touch.
Please ensure you change the portal on the eBird app on your phone to the New Zealand portal.
If you are wanting to upload any other observations via a laptop/PC, please ensure this is through the New Zealand eBird portal. You’ll notice that eBird automatically chooses the NZ portal based on your location. We will be gradually updating the New Zealand portal with more content to make it the key resource for all birders in Aotearoa beyond the Atlas.
We encourage you to continue to submit your valuable birding observations on a regular basis to the New Zealand eBird portal.
Remember the Atlas Essentials? Well they are still valuable to stick to, just call them ‘Birding Essentials’!
Continue to upload your observations wherever you are, and at whatever time, across the entire country as part of complete checklists (where/when safe to do so). Remember to add accurate abundances for each species, and split them into high resolution checklists over time (no less than 5 mins, and into hourly chunks if longer) and space (split into roughly 1km sections).
This will help continually update the impressive and cutting-edge Status and Trends outputs that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology produce each year.
We encourage you to upload your historical bird observations to eBird!
There is a wealth of data out there in dusty old notebooks, on hard drives and in a variety of other sources, that would be of immense value if they were uploaded to the national dataset via eBird. You can find out how to enter historical data here, and if you need any assistance please don’t hesistate to get in touch.
And finally, have fun! The Atlas was a fantastic project, and we know many of you created a daily habit to gather bird observations into eBird and enjoyed doing that with others. We hope you see the value of continuing to do just that, and have a.blast whilst doing it!
Atlas e-Book
For the Atlas team, we now begin the process of analysing all the Atlas data, mapping as many species as possible in collaboration with the eBird team. This will all go into an e-Book that will be made available to the community, to summarise the five year project. We hope to publish this in 12-18 months!
A huge thanks to you all again for all your efforts.
Happy birding!
NZ Bird Atlas Team
Dan, Mike, Pat and Sam
Contact us
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