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WEB SITE FOR THE BIRDS
By Sean Henahan, Access Excellence
Seattle, WA (2/14/97)
A novel web project will literally be for the birds, and for any amateur bird watchers and scientists making ornithological observations across North America.
The National Audubon Society and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology hope to encourage millions of potential collaborators, both professional and amateur, to share information on the locations and activities of various birds species across the US. The researchers debuted the world wide web project , dubbed BirdSource, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The site will begin flexing its virtual wings with 500 "penguins" (online bird-watchers) from the 10,000-member citizen-science program FeederWatch. The volunteers will report observations from feeders at homes and schools throughout the United States and Canada. The BirdSource will add more participants as it goes. Based at a national supercomputer center, the Cornell Theory Center in Ithaca, N.Y., the site does not lack for computing power. "You will be able to go to BirdSource and ask, 'Where were the Dark-eyed Juncoes in December 1934?' and instantly see a map displaying reported sightings of that species," said John W. Fitzpatrick, the Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "You will be able to 'watch' as millions of migrating hawks from North America funnel through Central America on their way to South America. You will come home from a day of birding, logon to BirdSource, and share your checklist with thousands of other amateur birders and with profes sional ornithologists who need your data." And if feeder-watchers aren't sure whether they've spotted a Northern Flicker or a Varied Thrush, for example, BirdSource will offer up detailed pictures of birds. Moreover, the system also will offer access to sound archives of bird calls stored at the Ornithology Lab's Library of Natural Sounds. The BirdSource project relies on the very latest in Internet technology to accomplish its goals. The system uses an Informix database server, a Netscape Web server, and Netscape's LiveWire client-server application development environment. JavaScript implementations allow users to proofread their entries and check their identifications. Dynamically generated maps of species distributions will be created using the geographic information systems (GIS) software. "BirdSource will provide the most current and comprehensive data on the distribution, migratory pathways and population trends for North American birds," said Audubon President John Flicker. "This partnership is a perfect marriage of Cornell's high-tech computer capabilities, the Lab of Ornithology's citizen-science team and Audubon's thousands of volunteer birders collecting data at the grassroots level. " In addition to the results from Project FeederWatch and other Cornell-based, citizen-science observations, BirdSource will be an archive of data from long-running national projects, including all the Christmas Bird Counts since 1900. These counts, managed by the National Audubon Society, represent the largest citizen-science program in the country, with more than 45,000 volunteers participating each year. The Web site will offer an array of opportunities for citizen-science participation in birding, from simple exercises to the complex, from fun to serious, Laboratory Director Fitzpatrick said. "An estimated 30 to 60 million people watch and feed birds," Fitzpatrick said. "At this moment thousands of people are jotting down notes about their observations. If they 'jot' them on the Web, we will be able to tune to the movements of bird populations, just like the weather reports track the movements of storm fronts. We will have up-to-the-minute accounts on where birds are at any given moment -- and so will anyone who opens BirdSource." Emphasizing the value to biological conservation of data gathered by thousands of volunteers across a wide geographical area, Fitzpatrick said: "If this had started in the 1890s when there still were passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets, perhaps we could have saved those birds. Now we can get information about diminishing species, in a form that we can understand and use, while there still is time to help."
Related information on the Internet BirdSource
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