Much of the research in basic and applied ecology is founded in descriptions of distribution and abundance of species. Long-term, well-organized data covering broad spatial scales are necessary for documenting change, generating hypotheses for the cause of these changes, and ultimately understanding how these changes relate to overall ecosystem health and function. While collecting a single-species occurrence datum is a well-understood process, the coordinated collection, curation, access, and storage of these data is no small task. Appropriately structured, openly available, and maintained in a consistent long-term cyberinfrastructure species occurrence, as well as other large-scale environmental datasets have become essential for studying biodiversity. The result is that annual estimates of the status, distribution and trends of biodiversity through advanced statistical models and data visualizations, can provide decision-makers with the best available and most reliable information on biodiversity to support, guide and measure conservation action and policy.
Results/Conclusions
This presentation will describe the cyberinfrastructure used to sustain the continued exponential growth of eBird, an online data resource for global bird biodiversity. With its launch in 2002, eBird opened a new era of real-time data gathering by birders, and by 2020, the project has become one of the world’s largest biodiversity monitoring projects. More than 500,000 contributors have submitted over 750 million bird observations of more than 10,000 bird species globally. These data provide comprehensive, high-resolution information about the spatial and temporal distribution of bird populations across a species full range. eBird data provide a valuable source of population-level distributional data for basic biological research and conservation applications. Data are openly available and have been downloaded more than 130,000 times by students, educators, government staff, and researchers, resulting in more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and hundreds of reports. Modeling eBird data have provided an unparalleled window into a species’ full annual cycle. eBird Status and Trends models combine observations for 610 North American birds with satellite imagery from NASA, NOAA, and the USGS to create extremely accurate range and abundance maps, seasonal habitat preferences, and annual population trend estimates. These are made at very high spatial (i.e., 3 x 3 KM grids) and temporal (i.e., weekly) across the Western Hemisphere. However, true to its beginnings, eBird is still grounded in serving as an essential tool for birding and more than 8 million people access eBird every year from every country to explore eBird data through interactive exploration, visualization and analysis tools.