With its easy to use and user-friendly features, eBird looks very much like the future for online bird recording and is now becoming inter-continental in use.
89 : eBird
2002
With its easy to use and user-friendly features, eBird looks very much like the future for online bird recording and is now becoming inter-continental in use.
The tracking of the seasonal and long-term changes in bird populations started properly with the institution of bird atlas surveys by the British Trust for Ornithology (see pages 158–159) and the rapid spread of this idea across the conservation and global landscape. However, such endeavours take a lot of manual data managing – it would surely be better if data could be entered by the observers themselves, and a computer could take care of its compilation, analysis and even its partial interpretation.
This idea was quick to take hold among ornithologists and conservationists, and the best, most forward-thinking and globally comprehensive application of the concept is eBird. Launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, USA, in 2002, eBird is an online database of user-generated bird sightings designed to show the actual – as opposed to estimated – state of bird distribution, numbers and abundance to biologists and amateur birders alike. Originally restricted to Europe and North America, its remit was stretched to include the entire globe by June 2010.
It is perhaps a crowning achievement of ‘citizen science’, the concept of ordinary members of society making their observations of nature count as part of a communal retrieval system of data. The concerns of birders – notoriously obsessed with rarer species – being pernickety about correct identifications and accuracy of counts are addressed through a system of expert data reviewers. But in any case, the advantage of such huge accumulations of data as eBird is that incorrect or inaccurate observations can be lost in the whole, becoming statistically redundant in the overall general accuracy of the ‘big picture’ figures and trends.
Almost simultaneously with the development of eBird in North America, between 2002 and 2004 the BTO itself was running a public observation survey called Migration Watch. This project was able to record the arrival times of British summer visitors, as well as their geographical spread and concentrations, on a virtually daily basis. To gain a more complete picture, the organisation began to extend the project to record departure times and then the presence and reach of every bird species throughout the year.
This extension mutated rapidly into BirdTrack, which to this day remains the single most comprehensive record bank of British bird sightings. Observations from other websites such as BirdGuides.com and those submitted from the field via mobile apps are also fed directly into the BTO’s system. Crucially, rather than operating as parallel but stand-alone schemes, an historic agreement in April 2013 saw eBird and BirdTrack enter into a data-sharing coalition, a special arrangement that will bring huge benefits.
Already the assembled data give a scientifically interpretable account of the impact of climate trends as they happen, and as the broader patterns emerge over the project’s long-term existence, the effects of these changes can be observed and perhaps even mitigated to an extent. Data from eBird and BirdTrack, along with other more specific sources, already shows that half of the world’s bird species appear to be nesting earlier than before, a state tightly correlated with climatic and meteorological data from the same time periods.
With the development of such programming capable of handling huge amounts of data, the contributions of citizen scientists are now transferred from their notebooks to part of a purposeful whole. In theory, we all realise we have a small part to play in noting the changes in the world around us, and that these very observations could help save the birds we watch, and the wilder countryside we enjoy while seeing them, for future generations.