Detailed numbers can help sound planning
By Pat Leonard, Cornell Lab of Ornithology
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| Photo by Will Collette |
A team of data scientists at eBird, the participatory
science platform, has packaged summaries covering every bird species, in every
state, and made
them available online for free. These data summaries will help states
prepare their federally required 2025 updates to State Wildlife Action Plans.
“As we began to work more closely with state agencies and
regional conservation partnerships, we realized that we needed to significantly
increase the accessibility of eBird information for these partners,” said
Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, assistant director of the Cornell Lab’s Center for
Avian Population Studies and the driving force behind development of the
state summaries.
“The state-level tables, charts and maps are an offshoot of eBird Status & Trends data products which analyze and visualize bird data submitted from all over the world,” said Andrew Stillman, a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Lab. “By providing these customized summaries, state agencies don’t have to wrangle with big data and spatial tools. They get data targeted to the area they are responsible for. It’s much more efficient, saving them time and money.”
State Wildlife Action Plans are critical to conservation in
the United States, Stillman said. The plans must be updated every 10 years and
submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for approval. Approval releases
funding from the State and Tribal Wildlife Grants program, which is used to
proactively conserve birds and other species that make up the biodiversity of
each state.
The 2025 updates will mark the second major revision to
state wildlife plans since the first plans were completed in 2005. But this is
the first time eBird state data summaries will be available to inform the
revisions, helping planners easily identify which species are in greatest need
of conservation and to set priorities for where and when to take conservation
action.
“Before the Cornell Lab provided these summaries, states
were using a mix of long-established monitoring programs and more targeted
local or regional monitoring surveys – for marsh birds or grassland species,
for example – to get a handle on how bird populations were faring statewide,”
said Bradley Wilkinson, bird conservation program manager for the Association
of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. “The eBird state-level summaries complement
those existing surveys. The summaries are also getting states to start thinking
about addressing the full-year annual life-cycle of migratory birds.”
Without year-round weekly bird abundance data from eBird, an
important part of the big picture is missing. For example, tundra swans don’t
breed in Michigan and are not found there for most of the year. But during two
weeks in March, 13% of the global population is migrating through Michigan,
making marsh and wetland habitat vital for stopovers during their long journey
back to their Arctic breeding grounds.
“Knowing a state’s responsibility for a certain percentage
of a species’ global population is really important in setting conservation
priorities,” Wilkinson said. “There’s a lot more connection information
available now about where a state’s breeding birds are going during autumn
migration, the nonbreeding season and during spring migration.”
The state summaries are updated each year with new
population numbers from eBird. With the latest August 2024 update, planners can
now also see which way bird populations are trending for the entire state:
increasing, decreasing or stable; and by how much.
“We’ll continue to refine and update the summaries so states
have what they need,” Stillman said. “We’re also looking into expanding this
customization for the two dozen Migratory Bird Joint Ventures in the U.S. and
Canada. Birds are not known for recognizing human boundaries and joint venture
partnerships work across boundaries to conserve birds and the habitats they
need, where they need it. The state planners tell us, ‘Keep it coming.’”
Pat Leonard is a writer for the Cornell Lab of
Ornithology.
