Archives for Citizen Science

In celebration of the August #BigYearAtHome challenge, #BirdingFromHome, we feature a fun article by Mike Green about his 2021 Green Big Year.

Our plans might be paused, but birds are not. During May, celebrate birds from home with webinars, online courses, giveaways and online resources.

Becky Keller, Alaine Camfield, and Bob Ford The PIF International Science Committee is a volunteer partnership of scientists from universities, NGOs, and agencies in the U.S, Canada, and Mexico dedicated to advancing scientific concepts and approaches for landbird conservation at range-wide and regional scales. The PIF Science Committee develops and maintains all aspects of the […]

Jennie Duberstein, Coordinator, Sonoran Joint Venture Reposted with permission from the Sonoran Joint Venture website http://sonoranjv.org/avicaching Avicaching, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is simply eBird + Geocaching: searching specific locations to spot as many birds as possible. With geocaching, people go to specific sites to find treasures. With Avicaching, eBird Hotspots are the […]

Ensuring that conservation decisions are informed by the best available data is a fundamental challenge in the
face of rapid global environmental change. Too often, new science is not easily or quickly translated into conservation
action. Open access data could serve as a tool to help bridge the gap between science and action, by providing conservation practitioners with access to relevant data in near real time. Broad-scale citizen-science data represent a fast-growing resource for open access databases, providing relevant and appropriately scaled data on organisms, much in
the way autonomous sensors do so on the environment. This paper uses eBird, a project where individuals around the
world submit data on bird distribution and abundance, as an example of how citizen-science data can be used to
achieve tangible conservation science and action at local, regional, and global scales. This examination illustrates
how these data can be strategically applied to improve our understanding of spatial and temporal distributions of
birds, the impacts of anthropogenic change on ecological systems, and creative conservation solutions to complex
problems.