State of the Birds

Wired Science has a good summary of the first federal State of the Birds report, which is arguably the most successful citizen science project to date, in which individuals from around the US reported local observations to produce a detailed census of bird populations in the nation.

The first federal State of the Birds report was released Thursday, marking the beginning of an unprecedented collaboration between government researchers and conservation groups — and the underlying data comes from you.

"The data that goes into this report is by and large not collected by a few tin-head scientists or conservation organizations, but by millions of individuals," said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. "We can begin to put together spectacularly massive databases that show us, in great detail with fine-grained scope, what the trends are."

The trends identified by the report are generally known. Hundreds of bird species are threatened by habitat loss, pollution and climate change. But in other ways, the report is novel. "It's a break from the one-institution, or handful-of-institution, approach," said Cornell University ornithologist Andrew Farnsworth. "This kind of partnership hasn't happened before."

Citizen Science Is for the Birds