Citizen Science in the City?

Birding apps offer urban residents a unique path to engage with nature

When we think about the natural world, we don’t normally picture urban spaces. Most of the time, we probably conjure up meadows or forests, maybe with a stream or pond — or maybe the ocean coastline. Yet wildlife and natural areas can also be found, sometimes abundantly, in cities and suburbs, and increasingly this is where we are most likely to interact with them.

photo of Birds on FencePhoto by Michael Leland The biggest boost to “citizen birding” participant numbers has come from the use of eBird, an online reporting, cataloging, and data sharing application.

Citizen science organizations offer city-dwellers a unique way to engage with nature, beyond, say, having a picnic in a park, or taking a stroll along an urban waterway. These groups put interested citizens to work conducting scientific research, allowing them to make a contribution to the science that supports conservation — and to have fun doing it.

“Citizen scientists currently play active roles in a wide range of ecological projects, and their contributions have enabled scientists to collect large amounts of data at minimal cost,” writes Rachel E. McCaffrey, of theSchool of Natural Resources, University of Arizona, Tucson in Urban Habitats, an online ecology journal. “Because bird-watching is popular among members of the general public, bird-monitoring projects have been among the most successful at integrating citizen scientists.” Projects gathering data from bird monitoring are also among some of the more common urban citizen science projects.

The biggest boost to “citizen birding” participant numbers has come from the use of eBird, an online reporting, cataloging, and data sharing application developed by a team at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and partners at the nonprofit National Audubon Society. In May 2015 alone, eBird participants entered data for more than 9.5 million bird observations from more than 100 nations around the world.

Both well-known and novice birders have been using eBird to tap into their passion while also contributing to research. Noah Stryker, a famous birder and adventurer who set a world record in 2015 for the number of bird species seen in a year, writes: “Since its launch in 2002, eBird has revolutionized the way birders worldwide report and share their observations… Articles have been written about eBird with mind-bending titles like, ‘eBird Changed My Life’ and ‘The Agony and Ecstasy of Surrendering to eBird.’”

I, too, have found the platform transformative. I live in urban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and use eBird nearly every day. Once I started using eBird some years ago, it became a part of my regular routine. I often enter data from just ten-minute or shorter periods of observation, having counted the chimney swifts or common nighthawks in my neighborhood, because these are two declining species that I track as part of work we do on “aerial insectivores” — a group of species that includes all of the swallows, other nightjars, and forest-dwelling flycatchers.

It also motivated me to set out on a decidedly non-routine birding adventure. In 2013, I walked across the state of Wisconsin, to increase awareness about bird conservation, and to raise funds for the Bird Protection Fund of the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin. I counted birds and eBirded my recorded observations for every part of the journey. I was moving slowly across the landscape, and experiencing the unfolding of spring migration hour by hour, logging the birds as they arrived in whatever part of Wisconsin I was passing through. I tallied 158 bird species during the journey, and noted each day’s arrivals, such as the year’s first Orchard Oriole, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, and three separate Bell’s Vireos, the latter decidedly uncommon in Wisconsin. When I started on April 24, it was raining and chilly, but by the last day, four weeks later, it was very warm and humid, and all of the trees in western Wisconsin had fully leafed out.

Linking the data gathering to the fundraiser helped my supporters measure how I was doing, and gave them a way to join in remotely, in a sense, making contributions per species I found. And yes: it was a great experience for me too.

Today, eBird has over 100,000 solidly-engaged users, with numbers increasing daily. It’s an incredible source of data for scientists looking at avian distribution and abundance, and the information is accessible to anyone else who is interested.

Related to eBird, and linked to it, is the Great Backyard Bird Count, now gathering data around the world over a single weekend in February each year. This year, GBBC participants recorded a total of 5,689 species (up nearly 600 from last year). And the event seems to be gaining in popularity. This year, participant numbers increased by nearly 20,000 to 163,763. Breeding bird atlases, which map bird distribution and abundance in defined geographic areas, are also utilizing ever-more-accessible digital pathways to record, catalog, and share data and involve interested citizens. In Wisconsin, our second Breeding Bird Atlas has fully embraced the age of digital citizen science, and has rolled out a new digital data-entry platform: a made-to-order eBird application, the Atlas eBird Portal. So far, over 700 cooperators from around the state have submitted atlas data, in just the first year of a five-year project.

I’ve also been involved with the Milwaukee BIOME project, through which a group of twelve scientists and eventually 150 volunteers worked to measure birds’ use of fragmented, urban habitats — including some pretty wonderful, but still fragmented, county parks, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Like many other citizen science projects, especially those in urban areas, the BIOME Project volunteers came from a wide cross section of people — students, retirees, and working moms, to name a few. Enthusiasm was their common denominator. They did not start out knowing how to conduct bird surveys or vegetation sampling — but their varied educational backgrounds and life experiences were no impediment to their learning these skills.

Of course, there is more to the urban ecology and citizen science world than just bird studies. Citizens can help collect data on butterflies (especially monarchs), bats, small mammals, reptiles, and much more in urban nature centers around the world. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, for example, promotes a number of these kinds of projects in southern California.

You can be a citizen scientist in every part of the United States, and in many other countries. So, are you ready to get out there?

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