eBird is the world’s largest biodiversity-related citizen science project, with over 100 million bird observations collected yearly from citizen scientists all across the world. The project is managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and several worldwide non-profit organizations and charitable organizations, such as The Nature Conservancy, Audubon Society, and Birds Canada. Citizen scientists, like bird watchers, document their bird sightings and upload their observations to eBird for the community to see and use. However, eBird is not just for sharing biodiversity information; it also provides the tools for citizen scientists to make interactive maps, graphs, and other visual tools to represent the data that they connect. In order for a sighting to be counted, the birder simply enters when, where, and how the data was collected, and then fills out a checklist of all the birds heard and seen in the outing. An expert then reviews the entry, and then it is placed into the common database on their website and mobile app, where data can be viewed and used by the global eBird community.
eBird. (2020). “About eBird.” https://ebird.org/about; Walker, J., & Taylor, P. (2017). Using eBird data to model population change of migratory bird species. Avian Conservation and Ecology, 12(1); Kolstoe, S., &
Cameron, T. A. (2017). The non-market value of birding sites and the marginal value of additional species: biodiversity in a random utility model of site choice by eBird members. Ecological economics, 137, 1-12.
Categories
Biodiversity, Citizen Science, Data, Internet of Things
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