Franklin

After counting birds at nearly 11,000 locations across Oregon using professional survey methods and adding more than 40,000 more counts from 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. – Oregon 2020

Read more about the Oregon 2020 Project here: https://ebird.org/pnw/about/oregon-2020 

Check out our Previous Community Science Projects page to stay up to date on how scientists are using the data that the community collected.

Do you have a community science project update? Email Elva at ejm@klamathbird.org.