Dear colleagues, The Avian Knowledge Network (AKN) is excited to announce the launch of its newly updated website: http://avianknowledge.net and requests your participation in joining us in this unique and very successful endeavor to conserve birds.
The AKN grew out of a series of discussions more than a decade ago, which in 2006 resulted in a grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund the network’s foundational infrastructure. >From that small beginning, the AKN has grown far beyond our expectations to become the primary source of bird monitoring data in the Western Hemisphere. One component of the AKN, eBird, is the most successful avian citizen science project in the planet and includes hundreds of millions of records. Other components (called AKN regional and thematic nodes), such as the California Avian Data Center, the Rocky Mountain Avian Data Center, and the Midwest (U.S.) Avian Data Center, host over 20 million records from several hundred research projects, including point count, banding, nest success, area search, and distance sampling data. An Eastern (U.S.) Avian Data Center is nearing launch, and will cover an area from the Caribbean islands to the state of Maine and west to Texas. Some nodes, such as Nature Counts, have extended their capacity to capture monitoring data from other taxa. In the beginning, the AKN focused on gathering and describing critical datasets for archival and research. More recently, the AKN has included an emphasis on the role of nodes as collaborative science-based systems where data, spatially-explicit research products, and web-based technologies are integrated into tools that provide information to natural resource management decision-makers. Combined, we are striving to implement existing and new science-based data standards, provide recommendations for best monitoring practices, and encourage innovation and use of data management, visualization, analysis, and decision support tools. True to our name and commitment to collaboration, transparency, and efficiency, we share data, lessons learned, and development costs of tools across AKN nodes. We eagerly invite you to visit http://avianknowledge.net to learn more about the AKN, explore some of the nodes and tools, and consider participating in the AKN. Best, The AKN coordinating team _________________________________________ Edward J. Laurent, PhD Executive Director Connecting Conservation http://connectingconservation.org
