ABI Sustaining: eBird: Maintaining the Cyberinfrastructure to Support the Collection, Storage, Archive, Analysis, and Access to a Global Biodiversity Data Resource

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Cornell University is awarded a grant to support 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 live, online checklisting for birders, and it soon became one of the world's largest citizen-science projects. By 2012, eBird had amassed 100 million total bird observations, and early in 2014 that number is 170 million-on track to double the previous decade's worth of data in just 2 years. With more than 200,000 citizen-science participants worldwide, eBird acts as a global-scale, real-time bird monitoring mechanism that is innovating new models of conservation. For example, a first-of-its-kind conservation project in California is using eBird models to target the flooding of rice fields in the specific places, and at precisely the right times, for waterfowl and shorebirds during migration. eBird's openly available data has been downloaded by more than 6,000 students, educators, government staff, and researchers, resulting in more than 110 peer-reviewed scientific papers. True to its beginnings, eBird is still grounded in serving as an essential tool for birding. More than 7 million people access eBird every year to explore data through interactive exploration, visualization and analysis tools that help birders find more birds. 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 their causes, 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 and sustained, the cyberinfrastructure that supports large species occurrence datasets can add value to the data, instead of merely acting as a tool for aggregating observations. The eBird data management infrastructure provides a unique resource for students, scientists, land managers, governments and amateurs. eBird's data: (1) come from a single, consistently gathered and curated source that is openly available and widely in use, (2) represents a substantial proportion of all available data on distribution of all organisms globally, and (3) provides these data in not just minimal form but as a set of value-added products that lower the threshold of data management needed to use these data. For more information about eBird, visit its website at http://ebird.org.