Citizen Science Projects

eBird
www.ebird.org
Keep track of your bird sightings year-round with eBird, a simple way to record your observations online and share what you’ve seen with scientists, educators, and other bird watchers. Submit and retrieve your own observations or find out what other eBirders are reporting from across North America. Your observations become part of a long-term database accessible to anyone who wants to learn more about the movements and distribution of birds across the continent.

Project FeederWatch
www.feederwatch.org
Help scientists track bird movements and monitor long-term trends in the distribution and abundance of birds in winter. From November to April, participants periodically count the species visiting their feeders and report their totals online or on paper data forms. Join the FeederWatch team and learn more about the birds in your own neighborhood. Project FeederWatch is a joint research and education project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada.

Great Backyard Bird Count
www.birdcount.org
Take part in this free, annual event that compiles bird counts from across the continent to create a winter snapshot of bird populations. You decide how long to watch during one or all of the four count days in mid-February. Enter your data online, then view maps, graphs, and summaries—and find out what scientists are learning from the results.

NestWatch
www.nestwatch.org
Monitor nests during the breeding season to collect information on the location, habitat, species, number of eggs, and number of young in the nest. Submit your data online, adding to observations from around the continent. You can download tables or use interactive Google maps for your own analyses.

NestCams and Cam Clickr
www.nestcams.org
Peer into the private lives of breeding birds! Cameras mounted near nests around the country show live, online images of birds courting, mating, laying eggs, and raising young. Witness life in the nest for Barn Owls, Osprey, bluebirds, swifts, flycatchers, seabirds, and more. Then put your nest-observation skills to work with CamClickr, and help scientists classify breeding behaviors from more than seven million archived images. (Warning – it’s addictive!)

New York State Breeding Bird Atlas
http://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7312.html
The Breeding Bird Atlas is a comprehensive, statewide survey designed to reveal the distribution of breeding birds in New York. New York is the first state to have conducted two atlas projects, one in 1980-1985, and a second from 2000-2005. Data collected by over 1200 volunteers can be examined in printed form in The Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in New York State, or online through the Department of Environmental Conservation website. Color maps for approximately 250 species show the current distribution of the bird in the state and the change in distribution over the twenty-year period.

Other Educational Resources

Macaulay Library
www.macaulaylibrary.org
The Lab’s Macaulay Library is the world’s online largest archive of animal behavior sounds and video. Watch streaming videos of hundreds of bird species and listen to the sounds of backyard birds, insects, fish, frogs, and mammals. The marine audio and video collection is unparalleled. A QuickTime plug-in lets you visualize sounds from video and audio files. Browse for recordings by taxonomic level or use advanced search functions to find recordings by geographic area or keyword, and then output a sortable spreadsheet of recordings that meet those criteria.

Additional downloadable sounds and videos from Macaulay Library (some free):
http://macaulaylibrary.org/products/index.do

Raven
www.RavenSoundSoftware.com
Raven is a software program for the acquisition, visualization, measurement, and analysis of sounds. Raven Lite is a free desktop software program that lets users record, save, and visualize sounds as spectrograms and waveforms. Raven Lite is intended for students, educators, and hobbyists, and can be used for learning about sounds, as an aid in birdsong recognition, and in musical instruction. Raven Viewer is a QuickTime plug-in which provides real-time visualizations of streaming sounds in the Macaulay Library's online archive.

The Birds of North America Online
www.bna.birds.cornell.edu
For the definitive resource on North American bird species visit The Birds of America Online. BNA Online provides comprehensive life histories for each of the 716+ species of birds breeding in the USA (including Hawaii) and Canada. This is a subscription service with a small annual fee. You may already have access via your local library or if you are a member of the American Ornithologists’ Union. BNA provides continuing access to comprehensive information for each species, along with photographs, videos, sounds, and spectrograms. The accounts are revised periodically, assuring up-to-date information.

All About Birds
www.allaboutbirds.org
The Cornell Lab’s All About Birds website is another spectacular place to find bird information. Written in a fun and publicly accessible style, All About Birds lets you quickly find the information you want – and it’s free. The most frequently visited bird site on the Web, it’s been recently revised with new sections on building your bird identification skills, complete with videos. And, with an online field guide complete with sounds and videos from the Macaulay Library, it just might replace your paper guides.

Neotropical Birds
www.neotropical.birds.cornell.edu
Neotropical Birds Online is an authoritative resource for life histories of Neotropical birds. These accounts are intended primarily for ornithologists, but also will prove useful to wildlife biologists, conservationists, amateur ornithologists with strong interests in avian natural history, and biology teachers and students. Neotropical Birds Online is available free of charge. The scope of Neotropical Birds Online is all bird species that regularly occur in the Neotropics, from Mexico and the Caribbean south to southernmost South America. The online format allows authors to revise their accounts to keep pace with new research. This format also allows incorporation of multimedia and links to related resources elsewhere on the web.

Science Pipes
www.sciencepipes.org
Science Pipes is an environment in which students, educators, citizens, resource managers, and scientists can create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data. It is built to support inquiry-based learning, allowing analysis results and visualizations to be dynamically incorporated into web sites for dissemination and consumption beyond the site itself.

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Bird Data Resources.pdf	334.29 KB