The Science of Birds - eBird and Citizen Science

Episode Date: August 21, 2021

eBird is a digital archive of bird observations. It’s a database of observations from across the planet. eBird users connect to the database via the Internet, to both contribute data and access data.In this episode, we’ll start off by going over what exactly eBird is. Then, we’ll consider the characteristics of the scientific data that eBird users produce. How do scientists make sure that data is of the highest quality? We’ll get into that too, as well as some useful tools that have been created using eBird data. I’ll also give you some interesting examples of published studies on birds that used eBird data.Links of InteresteBird best practices~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Link to this episode on the Science of Birds websiteSupport the show

imagine that you are a professional pet food taster. That's right, pet food taster. Your job is to evaluate new recipes for dog food and cat food by tasting it. Actually putting it in your mouth and tasting it. Yum. But this is a real job, seriously. I'm not joking. It pays well and most times requires an advanced degree in food science or culinary arts. Your boss at the pet food company has tasked you with developing a new line of doggy chow. You'll need to taste test and evaluate hundreds of variations of a new recipe to get the job done. But unfortunately, you have a scanty budget and the deadline is just around the corner. You're actually feeling kind of stressed about the whole thing. It's not that you mind tasting pet food. That's your job after all. But wouldn't it be

amazing if you could enlist an army of enthusiastic volunteers to help you get your research done faster and more efficiently? Volunteers who would chew on mouthfuls of slimy dog food for you? Hmm, this one tastes like I'm picking up, I'm picking up some propylene glycol, and a lot of rancid fish oil, maybe some ginger, chicken tongue, yeah, chicken tongue, and definitely, yeah, and definitely a hint of cow lung. Instead of trying to accomplish your goal alone with your very limited resources of time and money, you could have these crazy people do most of the hard work for you. They would collect the lion's share of the data, more than you ever could amass on your own.

All you need to do, as the professional scientist, is analyze the data from the volunteers and make your conclusions about which recipe is the yummiest. And yes, actual dogs will also weigh in to offer their opinions on the new recipe, but that comes later. This process is definitely what we'd call science, even though it's for a commercial product like dog food. And these hypothetical volunteers would then be acting as citizen scientists. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a citizen scientist as a member of the general public who engages in scientific work, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions, an amateur scientist. Citizen science is a big deal these days.

Never mind about dog food and all of that, because, of course, we're here to talk about birds and citizen science. More specifically, today's episode is all about e-bird. Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted, guided exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. I'm guessing you've at least heard of E-bird, the subject of this episode. You've heard about it from me since.

I've mentioned it in a handful of episodes already. I imagine many of my listeners use eBird regularly, and some are probably expert eBird users who know more about it than I do. I use EBird all the time, and I love to sing its praises. But I know people who are way more zealous about using Ebert, and I'm sure they could teach me a thing or two. Maybe you're in that category, too. Who knows? Regardless of your own experience using Ebert,

I really hope you enjoy this episode and learn something new. We'll start off by going over what exactly eBird is. Then we'll consider the characteristics of the scientific data that eBird users produce. How do scientists make sure that data is of the highest quality? We'll get into that too, as well as some useful tools that have been created using eBird data. I'll finish up by giving you some interesting examples of published studies on birds that use eBird data. Okay, shall we proceed? We shall. We shall. What is eBird? I actually find this question a little hard to answer succinctly in just a single sentence.

I'd say that at its core, eBird is a digital archive of bird observations. It's a giant database of observations from all across the planet. E-Bird users connect to the database via the internet to both contribute data and access data. Ebert is also a science project. It's an expansive citizen science project that dwarfs almost every other citizen science project to date. We might also think of Ebert as a mobile app, since that's the way most of us submit our observations. We use our smartphones. Or we can access the EBRD website using a desktop browser.

But the mobile app and website are really just portals or access points for the underlying database, aren't they? As for the physical location of where this database lives, well, the eBird website says that it's, quote, stored across secure facilities, end quote. Secure facilities, you say? I'm picturing a vast room full of monolithic servers, each of them glossy black with little blinking lights in green. and red. This secret facility is deep underground. Gun-toting guards patrol the server room with vicious German shepherds at their heels. No one is allowed in there without proper authorization. The doors will open for you only after a fingerprint scanner and a retinal scanner confirm that you do indeed have clearance. In the unlikely event that a terrorist incursion destroys all the servers

in a fiery explosion, we can still rest assured that our bird data is safe and secure. Because, because, of course, the database is backed up in similar facilities in several secret locations around the world. Who are these terrorists, you ask? We don't know. But some intel suggests they were financed by a group of extremist house cats. Yeah, I'm just making this stuff up here, you know, but I bet at least some parts of that story are true. In any case, Ebert was officially launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The lab is based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The Audubon Society was also a founding partner of the project. Ebert today is supported by grants, sponsors, and donations. At first, Ebert data covered only the

Western Hemisphere. It was expanded to cover the entire planet in 2010. So Ebert hasn't really been around all that long. It's impressive to see how much it's grown in a short time and how influential it is these days. The purpose of the eBird project was and is to crowdsource the collection of bird observations and to make this data freely accessible to scientists, educators, and birders. Crowdsourcing allows the Cornell Lab to gather infinitely more data on birds than it ever could by using only its own scientists and staff. This sort of thing only became practical with the rise of the Internet.

Another quantum leap came with the spread of smartphones in the early 2010s. So E-Bird went global in 2010 and pretty soon after that, everyone was carrying around a smartphone. They could enter bird observation data into E-Bird from anywhere on the planet at any time, at least theoretically.

Birding had really moved into the 21st century and there was no looking back. Now, have you ever heard of nematodes? These are mostly tiny animals that we call round worms. They have their own phylum within the kingdom animalia, phylum nematoda. These worms are diverse and ubiquitous in just about every habitat on earth. Many of them are parasites that live inside other animals or plants. humans have about 35 species of parasitic nematodes.

Nathan Cobb, a famous scientist who studied nematodes, a nematologist, wrote this. Quote, if all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable. And if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, veils, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The locations of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes. End quote. Why am I talking about nematodes? Because there's this really cool map on the eBird website. It's a map of the earth, and it's all black.

Except, that is, for anywhere there's a data point in e-bird. Every tiny data point, which represents the location of a bird observation, is displayed in yellow. So this is a map of all the places on the planet where there's e-bird data. What's amazing to me is that data points trace the outlines of pretty much all the continents, and large portions of the land areas are nearly filled in with the glowing yellow dots. You can see where the cities are, the highways, and cruise ship routes across the ocean. It's kind of mind-blowing. So this map, it's sort of like we swept away all the matter in the universe

except the locations of our e-bird observations. The locations of towns are decipherable since, for every massing of human beings, there is a corresponding massing of birders. As of today, 10,517 of the world's birders, species have been documented in e-bird. That's almost every living bird species that ornithologists currently recognize. The database includes nearly 58 million checklists submitted by a little over 700,000 citizen scientists. We can also call these people e-birders. This whole crowd sourcing thing only works if you've got a crowd, right? How did the e-bird team at the Cornell Lab get 700,000 people

to participate? How do you turn citizens into an army of citizen scientists into e-birders? An advantage from the beginning of the project was that birders, as a group, already had a long history of being enthusiastic, if not also fastidious, keepers of lists. Many birders like to know what species they've seen and where and when they saw them. They take notes and keep lists. Despite this, eBird had a slow start after it was launched in 2002. For many years, the staff at the Cornell Lab tried to attract new participants by using the message, Help scientists track birds! But eventually, the lab changed their messaging.

Right now, the About page on the EBird website starts off with a bulleted list that reads, Find more birds. Keep track of your bird lists. photos, and sounds, explore the latest sightings from around the world, join the world's largest birding community, and contribute to science and conservation. Notice that helping scientists is now the last thing on the list. It's like, hey, you self-centered jerk, use eBird if you want to find more birds, or if you want to make new friends, or, I don't know, maybe help some scientists and stuff if you're into that sort of thing. But seriously, the eBird team has had more success

getting people to participate after they started appealing, not to our altruism, but to our more basic attitude of what's in it for me. So now there are monthly challenges and drawings on the eBird website. For example, there's the 2021 checklist a day challenge. If you submit at least one checklist a day for the entire year, you get entered into a drawing to win a pair of fancy Zeiss binoculars. Ebert also keeps track of the top 100 e-birders for each region. This is a ranking of who has submitted the most checklists to Ebert, or who has recorded the highest numbers of species. In my home state of Oregon, for example, the top e-burder has submitted a whopping 56,635 checklists.

Wow, that's impressive. But guess where yours truly ranks on the list? I've submitted a measly 252 lists to date, and that puts me way down at the rank of 631. Woo-hoo! This whole top e-burder thing probably triggers the competitive instinct in some people, driving them to submit more data. And that's great.

Hooray for more data. I'm just not that competitive, so this trick doesn't really work on me. I'm just fine taking 631st place in the competition. Another cool way that the eBird team has increased participation is their global big day event. This is where birders around the world are encouraged to go out on a particular day in spring to record as many species as possible in 24 hours. Every year, the Global Big Day event breaks the previous records for the number of participants, the number of bird species, etc.

This year, for example, over 51,000 people from 192 countries submitted checklists on May 8th. Collectively, they recorded 7,234 bird species. That is pretty awesome. So, has all of this worked? Have more people gotten involved with e-bird as citizen scientists? Heck, yes, they have! Over the last decade, the number of bird observations and the number of e-birders has grown by leaps and bounds. Participation has been increasing by about 20% from one year to the next.

Over 100 million bird observations have been added into the database in each of the last few years. Pretty soon, we're going to need more servers and more of those, secret underground facilities with the retinal scanners and the guard dogs and what have you. Now let's have a look at the characteristics of eBird data, the kind of information it contains. Most of us use our mobile phones to record and submit our eBird data. So let's imagine you and I are outburning. We've got our binoculars and phone. Maybe we're walking in the Godavari forest in the Himalayan foothills outside of Kathmandu, Nepal.

It's cool and comfortable this morning at 61 degrees Fahrenheit or 16 degrees Celsius. We're seeing and hearing birds like Great Barbette, white-throated fan tail, Himalayan bull-bull and fire-breasted flower pecker. We decided up front that you are the designated data entry person on our walk. There's no sense in both of us keeping lists. You'll share your list with me later with just a couple of button taps in the app. You have the eBird app open on your phone, and it knows our location because it uses the phone's GPS. And the app is recording the exact path that we're walking, the distance, elevation, etc.

The app automatically records the date and time and the duration of our outing, but we can edit any of these values later if we need to. We keep a running checklist of every bird species we see in the forest, and we also do our best to record the numbers of individual birds we see for each species. I've also got my camera with a decent telephoto lens, so I snap a few lousy photos of birds. I can upload these to our checklist when I get home. I can, for example, add my photo of a crimson sunbird to that species entry on our list.

Our lovely birdwalk is done, and now it's time to submit the checklist to eBird. For the sake of our little story, let's assume we have an internet connection. Even if we didn't, we could submit the checklist later. Before we complete the submission, we have to answer a couple of questions in the app. First, we need to verify the location. We open up the map in the app, and there we can see any nearby EBird hotspots. These are officially recognized locations that are known to birders. We don't see any hotspots nearby, but that's no problem.

We just verify our location on the map, which includes a colored line of the route we walked. Then we need to choose the quote-unquote observation type. Since we were recording our track, the app automatically chooses traveling as the observation type. The other options are stationary for when you're just sitting in one spot while birding and incidental. You would choose incidental

for a checklist when you weren't really birding per se, but you happen to come across what you decided was a noteworthy bird. Like maybe you were just loitering around in a Pizza Hut parking lot and hey, what's that? Croyky! It's a black-faced cuckoo-shrike.

Sweet. Just record that bad boy in e-bird with an incidental checklist, then you can get right back to your loitering. Anyways, back to Nepal and our e-bird list. Before submitting our checklist, we note how many observers there are in our group. There's just the two of us, so two. Here's where you can choose to share the list with me. When I accept it in my e-bird account, the checklist will become a permanent part of my own records in e-bird. The final question to answer in the app, is whether this is a complete checklist. In other words, does the list include all of the birds we were able to identify?

You click yes and then submit. Answering these final questions takes just a few seconds usually, so it's no big deal. Easy peasy. In short, we tell eBird when, where, and how we go birding. We make our checklist of all the birds we could identify by sight or sound. Submit the checklist, and there you go. A checklist is one type of data in the database. Every species you record in a checklist is an observation,

and each observation has a bunch of data associated with it, including the bird's species, the number of individuals, the location, date, time, maybe a photo or two, and so on. This is the data that eBird makes available to ornithologists or other researchers who want to do some science on birds. Not all eBird data is created equal. If you have 700,000 people submitting millions of checklists every year, don't you think that some of that data will be a little, well, suspect?

In other words, substandard, unreliable, rubbish? We shouldn't expect e-birders to always identify every bird correctly. They, we, are human after all. Some of us make mistakes. I mean, I never make mistakes, for the record, but we're not talking about me. So what mechanisms does the Cornell Lab and the e-bird team use to ensure that the database contains data of the highest quality possible? First, they have set up a filtration system. Many regions around the world have automated filters set up behind the scenes in eBird

to catch any unusual bird sightings that get reported. Each filter is an algorithm created and updated by a volunteer who has expert knowledge about their local birds. The filter is, as described on the eBird website, a list of species and their expected maximum counts for specific time periods throughout the year. A filter might be set up for a county, a state, a country, or an ecoregion. When a filter catches an unusual bird observation, that observation gets flagged. Unusual could mean that the species is very rare, or it could be a more common species

reported in higher than expected numbers for that time of year. I never make mistakes, as we've already established, but if, hypothetically, I were to submit an e-bird checklist that I made in my backyard and that list included an Arctic loon flagged. That's an unusual sighting, to say the least, because the Arctic loon has never been reported here in Washington County, Oregon. But let's say it's a hot day in July, and I happen to see a varied threat. in my backyard. I put it into eBird and it gets flagged. Unlike Arctic loons, varied thrushes are common in Oregon and in my backyard. Just not in July. The varied

thrush is an altitudinal migrant in this region. In summer they're way up in the mountains. It's not impossible for a varied thrush to end up in my yard in July, but but it's far more likely for these birds to visit my yard in winter. Similarly, if I report that I saw 400 Wilson's warblers in my yard one day, guess what's going to happen? That's right, flagged by the filter. Because 400 is just too many Wilson's warblers. One or two or several Wilson's warblers, no problem.

Those numbers would be well within the expected range. So filters are on the front line in the war against bad data. Next in line are the eBird reviewers. These are actual humans who generously volunteer their time to make sense of suspicious data. Reviewers are often highly skilled, knowledgeable birders. A reviewer typically takes on the responsibility for data from a particular region, like a county, state, or a province. When an observation gets flagged, a reviewer takes a look at it.

Ultimately, it's up to them to accept or reject the observation. A reviewer may email the e-birder who submitted the data that got flagged to get some clarification. Like, dear Ivan, please provide some evidence that you actually saw an Arctic loon in your backyard. A photo or video would be nice. I'm not saying you're a liar, but an Arctic loon is a little. is about as likely as the Loch Ness monster in your county. No offense, but are you sure that you weren't on drugs that day? I like to think of eBird reviewers as all working together in a big command center,

like NASA's mission control. The reviewers all have head microphones on, and they're typing frantically on keyboards and scanning their computer monitors. The place is a flurry of activity 24 hours a day. An enormous screen dominates the room, displaying a map of the world. The map is peppered with blinking red dots for all the incoming sightings

that are being flagged by filters. The reviewers are shouting things like, Someone just claimed they saw five Oriental storks in Manhattan. I'm on it. Or, hey Sam, do you have that report on how many bearded vultures is too many bearded vultures for Switzerland and June? In reality, eBird reviewers are scattered across the world.

There's no commands. Center. Reviewers work independently on desktop computers or laptops at home, in coffee shops, or wherever they can. What they do may not be glamorous, but we owe the reviewers our gratitude for freely lending their expertise and time. They make sure the data in Ebert is as reliable as possible. Having run the gauntlet of the automated filters, and the reviewers, the eBird observation data is ready to be put to use. We'll get to how the data is used in scientific research and conservation in a moment. But here I want to highlight some tools that the Cornell Lab has created to make life better for birders.

These are digital tools that display eBird data in different ways to help us both understand birds and to find them. I encourage you to go to the eBird website, eBird.org, and poke around if you haven't already. There's lots of cool stuff on there. For example, there's an interactive heat map of all the world's birding hotspots. You can see, at a glance, where the highest numbers of species are, because the hotspots are color-coded. The ones with the warmest colors, like dark orange and red, reflect the greatest diversity. You can zoom in on this map to figure out where all the birds are.

I use this map all the time, from planning my next birding outing for the weekend to doing research for an upcoming birding tour that I'm going to lead. You can also look at maps for individual bird species. You just type in the bird's name, click, and the map shows you everywhere that species has been observed. At large spatial scales, the locations are shown as pixels, in shades of purple.

The darker the shade, the more often the bird has been reported there. When you zoom way in to a small spatial scale, you can see the individual hotspots where the species has been sighted. If you click on the hotspot, a little pop-up shows you the latest date the bird was seen there,

with links to the most recent checklists. Then there are the bar charts. For any hotspot or region, the e-bird website will generate a bar chart that shows which birds are found at that location over the course of a year. By skimming the chart, you can tell when birds arrive or depart if they're migrants. And the thickness of the bars reflects how common the species is for each week of the year. But some of the most exciting tools, in my opinion, are those under the category of

e-bird status and trends. This is where the scientists at the Cornell Lab have used fancy statistics to combine e-bird observation data with high-resolution satellite imagery to generate super-detailed maps. These maps show where a given bird species is found, in what abundance, and how that changes over the course of a year. In essence, these are the 21st century versions of the range maps you find in field guides. The difference is, these e-bird-powered maps are much more detailed and precise, and they can be updated on a regular basis using the latest data. There are even looping animations of these maps for many species.

Watching the animations, which are mesmerizing, you can see where a migratory bird species moves across the seasons. It's so cool, and seriously, you've got to check out these maps if you haven't already. At present, maps have been generated for old. over 800 species. Most of these are in North America, but the list has been growing and now includes a smattering of species from around the world. Hopefully, we'll see maps for thousands of species before too long. Another useful tool powered by eBird data is the photo and sound quiz. This is a multiple choice quiz that shows you photos of birds to identify. You set the parameters

for the location and date, and the quiz generates 20 bird photos for some likely species. Alternatively, you can listen to 20 bird sound recordings to guess the species. The photos and recordings in the quiz are crowdsourced. They were submitted by e-birders along with their checklists. Many of the photos are low quality and kind of challenging. But I think that's a good thing, because you can practice identifying birds in awkward poses

or under less than ideal lighting conditions. And while there are some other useful eBird-based tools out there, the last one I want to tell you about right now is the eBird app built into your car. Well, that's assuming you own one of several recent model cars built by Subaru. These Subaru's have a big touchscreen multimedia center in the dashboard. There's an eBird app built in and it's exclusive to Subaru. The app can show you what birds have been seen recently in the area.

You can also use the app to navigate to the nearest hotspot to chase whatever bird you're excited to see. Oh look, honey, someone saw an American Robin yesterday. It's at a park only 18 miles away from here. Should we go? Okay, let's do it. Let's go. Strap on your seatbelt and hang on.

There are many types of questions that scientists can use e-bird data to answer. But most of these questions have something to do with where birds are, in space and or time. That shouldn't surprise you, since you know that every bird observation in the e-bird database is, fundamentally, a record of the bird's geographic location, stamped with the time and date it was seen. So far, eBird data has been used in over 400 peer-reviewed research papers. 93 of these were published in 2020, and by my count, 101 have already been published in 2021. As the eBird database continues to grow, it will be even more useful to researchers in the future. Now, I want to give you a few examples of published studies that used eBird data. These are recent papers that I cherry-picked because I think they're cool,

and they should give you a little taste of what's possible. First off is a study published in 2021 by researchers from Sydney, Australia. The journal is The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers used some sophisticated statistical analyses to estimate the global abundance of birds, that is the total number of individual birds on the planet. The analysis combined professional abundance data from 724 well-studied bird species with e-bird data.

The total number of species included in the project was 9,700, which is about 92% of the world's species. So what did the researchers come up with? What was their estimate for how many individual birds there are in the world. 50 billion. 50 billion, that's a lot. But even so, the world needs more birds.

The more the better, as far as I'm concerned. For comparison, there are about 7.8 billion humans swarming the planet these days. So there are about six birds for every human. This study did more than come up with that single estimate of global bird abundance. The researchers also looked at patterns in abundance. across species, across avian orders, and among geographic regions.

As for the differences in abundance across species, as you might imagine, some species are a lot more abundant than others. For example, house sparrows, European starlings, and ring-billed gulls each have global populations over one billion. So, when I said the world needs more birds, I wasn't talking about those sorts. species. We're good on house sparrows. Thank you very much. But far more bird species are at the other end of the abundance distribution. They are relatively rare. Some may have small populations for natural reasons, while others are rare because humans have been giving them a hard time.

This study is a great example of the power of e-bird and citizen science. Without amateur birders submitting checklists around the world, research on this enormous spatial scale, including thousands of species, would be almost impossible. The next study looked at birds on a much smaller spatial scale. In this case, the geographic area in question was New York City. This study was published in 2020 in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning. The authors of this study analyzed 17 years of e-bird data from 322 parks across New York City. They call these parks urban green spaces.

The goal of the study was to figure out how the size, shape, and degree of isolation of a green space influences the number of bird species found there. It turned out that the most important factor is the size, the area of an urban green space. The larger the park, the more bird species were observed there. Neither the shape of the green space nor its isolation from other green spaces mattered. Tree canopy cover was also looked at in this study. The researchers figured out that having more tree cover is important for migratory birds in the spring. This kind of research is super useful for urban planners and conservationists who are trying to increase bird species diversity in a city.

If you know that a park's size is the most important factor, you can design new greensbases accordingly. The next study I want to tell you about used e-bird in a creative way to look at hybridization between bird species. It was published in 2020 in the journal Evolution. The researchers in this case wanted to quantify the rates of hybridization for wild birds in the United States.

The e-bird database contains records of hybrids. If you see what you think is a hybrid bird, and you can guess the two-parent species, you can submit your observation to eberd. Like, maybe you think you saw a hybrid between a golden-crowned sparrow and a white-crowned sparrow. Okay, cool.

But the automated filters we talked about earlier are probably going to catch that putative hybrid and flag it. Then, a reviewer will step in. They'll probably ask for photos or any concrete details that might confirm that the hybrid is the real deal. The title of this paper is,

birds rarely hybridize, a citizen science approach to estimating rates of hybridization in the wild. So you can guess that the researchers didn't find too many examples of hybrids. Eight years of e-bird data from across the U.S. was analyzed. That included about 330,000 individual bird observations. Of those, only 0.064% were confirmed hybrids. And most of those hybrids were the offspring of just a handful of parent species, like the Western gull and mallard. This research gives us some insight into the evolution of birds at the species level,

how often they interbreed or don't interbreed. Based on the results, it seems, hybridization is indeed a rare event in birds. Okay, how about one last example of research using eBird data? This one is from my local area, here in Oregon. About 20 minutes from my house is a major e-bird hot spot called Fern Hill Wetlands. Birders have reported 240 species at this location. Birds like tundra swan, Virginia Rail, Green Heron, Bald Eagle, White-breasted Nut Hatch, and Marsh Wren. This is my go-to birding spot if I want to get out and have some fun for a couple hours.

Fern Hill Wetlands is actually a wastewater treatment facility. It used to be a bunch of large, featureless sewage ponds, but in 2012, a major habitat restoration program got underway. Hundreds of thousands of native plants were brought in, both aquatic plants and land plants. Almost 200 large logs were placed around the ponds, some of them standing vertically out in the water to provide perches and nesting habitat. I can tell you that the transformation of the place since 2012 has been astonishing. The open ponds used to have hardly any vegetation. Sure, there were birds there, but it wasn't very natural looking or attractive. These days, it feels much more natural. The research in this case was conducted by

scientists from our local Audubon Society, in partnership with Clean Water Services, who owns the property. The researchers conducted their own professional surveys of fernhill wetlands for five years, from 2015 to 2020. They combined their survey data with eBird data, both pre-restoration and post-restoration. The results were that species diversity increased significantly after the habitat restoration and has continued to increase in the last five years. Bird abundance has also increased. It seems the introduction of native vegetation really has made a big difference. Since I like to go birding at Fernhill Wetlands and I record my observations in eBird, I'm happy to know that I'm generating data that can be used for bird conservation research like

this. Likewise, observations that you contribute to eBird may someday help us better understand birds. And your data may be used to protect birds through conservation research. In fact, if you've submitted checklists to eBird, I think there's a good chance your data has already been used in one way or another to make the world a better place. I hope this episode inspires you to try using EBird if you aren't already familiar with it. You don't have to be an expert birder to use e-bird. It's for anyone who likes to go birding. There are definitely some best practices for submitting checklists to e-bird, and I'll put a link to those in the show notes. I'm super grateful to all my patrons who support this podcast through Patreon. There

are monthly contributions really help me out as I work hard on the podcast. My newest patrons are Carl, Brandon, Maggie, and Emily. Thanks so much, you guys. I really appreciate the support. If you're curious about this whole Patreon thing and you're interested in supporting the podcast, you can check out my Patreon page at patreon.com forward slash science of birds. You can shoot me an email if you have something you'd like to share with me, maybe a comment about the podcast, or about your favorite flavor of dog food, or about that one time you saw a bird that was clearly a hybrid between a golden eagle and a ruby-throated hummingbird.

In any case, my email address is Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. You can check out the show notes for this episode, which is number 33, on the Science of Birds website, scienceofbirds.com. I'm your humble host, Ivan Philipson, and I can't wait to nerd out about birds with you next time. Cheers. Thank you.