AnnuAl RepoRt to membeRs | 2012 - Cornell Lab of Ornithology

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Citizen Science:Birdingtools for beginning birders and hard-core listersCornell Lab citizen-science programs recruit new demographics into birding,opening people’s eyes to birds while connecting them to science. Initiativeslike Celebrate Urban Birds bring birding to an inner-city audience, andyield insights about how certain species fare in heavily developed areas. Thenew YardMap program offers online landscaping tools for homeowners todesign bird-friendly backyards. And eBird provides an invaluable online toolsetfor birders at any level. In addition to easy e-listing, eBird offers maps withHotspots and collections of eBird lists in prime birding areas. Time charts ofspecies abundance allow birders to see when and where there’s prime-timeviewing for migratory birds. And for competitive birders, there’s the eBird Top100—a daily ranking of the most prolific birders by lists and total species.eBird South of the BorderThe eBird technology platform can easily be adapted to bird-monitoring projectsin other countries. In Mexico, the aVerAves program (eBird Mexico) enabled abird-survey project, coordinated by the Mexican government and its CONABIOconservation agency, that gathered data on almost 300 species in the mountainoussouthern Los Tuxtlas region, where critical bird habitat is threatened by agriculturalexpansion. In Chile, the launch of the Red de Observadores de Aves y Vida SilvestreeBird portal has been crucial to identifying important areas for bird conservation.Recently, the Chilean government announced that projects requiring environmentalimpact statements must consult with eBird Chile to evaluate effects on bird species.Bird DataPowerhousethe biggest avian database everOver the past decade, Cornell Lab computerengineers have built a single, unifiedplatform that combines all the data collectedby the Lab’s entire suite of citizen-scienceprograms. The platform includes more than 100million bird observations from eBird, as well as 20million winter bird records from Project Feeder-Watch and 10 million observations from the GreatBackyard Bird Count. And the platform includesmore than just bird sightings, with breeding datafrom the more than 400,000 nests that have beenmonitored by NestWatchers. It all adds up to morethan 200 million records, the most powerful birddatabase ever created—and all of it easily accessibleto scientists and conservationists.14
Birding can be a powerful force for understanding and protecting birdsSCIENCEA Continuous Continental Winter Bird SurveyeBird Illuminates Climate-Change ShiftsStudies examining changes in the arrival dates of migratory birds acrosstheir range have historically been constrained to small scales because formaldata were recorded only at specific reserves or research stations. Then cameeBird. In 2012, University of North Carolina researcher Allen Hurlbert publisheda groundbreaking study showing how climate change is affecting birdmigration. Hurlbert examined millions of spring eBird observations for 18bird species from 2000 to 2010. By cross-referencing with weather data, hefound that bird species were shifting up their arrival dates almost a day forevery Celsius degree of increasing spring temperature. A few species, such asRed-eyed Vireo, Great Crested Flycatcher, and House Wren, shifted up theirarrival by as many as three to six days.“Volunteer citizen-scienceprograms such as ProjectFeederWatch and eBird haveproven extraordinarily important,even indispensable,for the success of modernbroad-scale avian ecologicalstudies.”—Benjamin Zuckerberg,Department of Forest andWildlife Ecology,University of WisconsinIn 2012 Project FeederWatch celebrated 25 yearswith more than 50,000 backyard birders reportingon feeder activity—and providing scientists with adeep dataset of bird abundance and ranges. CornellLab researcher David Bonter examined FeederWatchdata from 1989 to 2006 to describe a markeddecline in Evening Grosbeaks, with a 27% decreasein flock size and 50% drop in sites reporting anygrosbeaks at all. The University of Wisconsin’s BenZuckerberg analyzed data collected between 1990and 2010 revealing that American Robins arrived 13days earlier in Wisconsin in spring, 1.5 days soonerfor every 1° C increase in winter temperatures.EveningGrosbeak byJudithBlakelyConservationImportant Bird Areas Near ChicagoConducting a proper bird inventory used to requirehundreds of hours of data processing, meaningthat only well-staffed operations could do it. Butwith eBird, the Chicago Wilderness Habitat Project,a small conservation group in northeastern Illinois,launched a bird survey with automatic online datacompilation that involved thousands of Chicago-areabirders. Using data from its eBird portal, the groupprovided recommendations to land managers onprotecting key species and sensitive nesting areas.eBirders IMprove outlook for sagebrush birdsThe State of the Birds 2011 report, published by the Cornell Lab and partnersand delivered to the U.S. Department of the Interior, highlighted the importanceof public lands as bird habitat. As a follow-up the Lab provided eBirdmodels to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) showing distribution datafor sagebrush birds in the Intermountain West, including Brewer’s Sparrow,Sage Sparrow, Sage Thrasher, and Green-tailed Towhee. BLM policies willnow be adjusted to maximize benefits for sagebrush birds. “These models,based on tens of thousands of eBird observations, represent the best picturewe have of bird distributions in the West,” said Lab conservation scientistKen Rosenberg. “The eBird data opened the eyes of federal land managers tothe tremendous opportunities for conserving birds on BLM lands.”Sage Thrasher by Chris Wood15
Page 1: Annual Report to members | 2012
Page 6 and 7: Technology:Gathering the DataThe po
Page 8: TechnologyGlobal reachOur Model:“
Page 11 and 12: yProviding what international partn
Page 13: Our Innovating Model: the Means Eng
Page 17 and 18: In fall 2012, the joint project wit
Page 19 and 20: Innovating Inspiring Anyone, the Me
Page 21 and 22: Discovering birds, connecting to na
Page 23 and 24: A letter toOur donors2012 was a mil
Page 25 and 26: donors$100,000 and upMr. and Mrs. R
Page 27 and 28: Dr. Thomas J. DelaneyMr. William E.
Page 29 and 30: Sapsucker Woods SocietyRecognizing
Page 31: Fiscal Year 2012Financial REport(Ju

AnnuAl RepoRt to membeRs | 2012 - Cornell Lab of Ornithology

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