I'd like to thank Jesse and Jonathon for starting this thread. I wanted to mention a bit about the goals and results of eBird. eBird was founded on the belief that birdwatchers observations have meaning. We believe that by bringing together observations from as many people in the world who enjoy birds as possible, we can learn about birds on a scale that has barely been imagined. Because birds don't limit themselves to any political boundary, we have built eBird so it can gather around the world -- the goal for this was to understand bird populations, but we've found it also works better for birders. In May, eBird gathered nearly 4.8 million records. That said, we have a long way to go. While we have some very active eBird users in Minnesota (Peder Svingen is one of the most active eBirders anywhere in the world), we hope to engage many more.
I encourage everyone to visit eBird and look at the view and explore data tab. Take a look at the range maps, which you can modify to look at a particular month, year or season.. As you zoom in, the maps switch from a grid to point maps that you can click on to see who saw the species and how many. You can click on the checklist to view the entire list of birds seen. Also take a look at the bar charts, which provide a seasonal view of bird occurrence in a region. This is an excellent tool to see when to visit a certain region if they want to find a particular species. If you click on the name of the species, you can see information on high counts and other metrics of occurrence. Similarly, for refuge managers, this tool provides an excellent way to manage habitat (such as water impoundments for shorebirds) at the time that is right for that region. You can create these bar charts for states, counties, important bird areas or even your backyard. There are many other features including alerts, which can send you an email message when a species that you have not entered into eBird is reported in a county or state. I encourage you to explore. http://ebird.org/ebird/ny/eBirdReports?cmd=Start To get into more details about our vision for uniting birders, researchers and conservationists, I encourage you to view our paper in the peer-reviewed journal, PLoS Biology: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001220 Data that are entered in to eBird are available to everyone, not simply tp staff at the Cornell Lab, Audubon and the hundreds of other partner organizations. An incomplete list of scientific publications is available at the link below. In particular, you may want to look at the recent paper by Hurlbert and Liang (University of North Carolina) that looks at the relationship between temperature and spring arrival dates. http://ebird.org/content/ebird/about/ebird-publications Finally, as a means of glimpsing what is possible with eBird I encourage you to look at the third State of the Birds Report, which was released in Washington, D.C at an event featuring Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar. Much of this report is the direct result of contributions made by birders who enter their sightings into eBird. Analysis of eBird data served as the foundation for the report and highlights the type of contributions that we can make as individual birders when we come together as a community. You can read and download the entire report including the methods of analyzing eBird data at the link below (Link on the left that says "Our Approach"). There are also links to many of the maps used in compiling the results. I encourage you to visit the site, read the report, browse the amazing data, and consider the potential for further breakthroughs as eBird data continue to multiply and analysis techniques grow ever more sophisticated. http://www.stateofthebirds.org/ Also in the report was the following "Thank You to eBird Volunteers" "Our understanding of bird distributions has greatly improved thanks to the thousands of bird watchers who have contributed observations to eBird ( www.eBird.org <http://www.ebird.org/> ). This effort is especially important for tracking seasonal and fine-scale changes in bird distributions, which is not possible with other bird-monitoring programs. However, even this massive observation network provides only imperfect information for assessing the year-round status of birds on many remote public lands across the U.S., including Alaska, Hawaii, and island territories. We urge birders to submit more observations to eBird from public refuges, parks, forests, and wilderness areas. We also urge agencies to support the submission of current and historical records to eBird and other data archives." I hope that this report shows just the beginning of what we can accomplish by sharing our observations in eBird and making them available to the global community of researchers, educators, and people working to conserve birds and their habitats. eBird isn't perfect. But we are constantly improving to make it a better tool for birders, researchers and conservationists. To all of you who use eBird, thank you for making your bird observations make a difference. If you haven't used eBird in a while or never used it, I encourage you to give it a try. Thanks for reading. Good eBirding, Chris Wood eBird & Neotropical Birds Project Leader Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York http://ebird.org http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
