The EuroBirdPortal (EBP) project
The EuroBirdPortal (EBP) project and its demo viewer (www.eurobirdportal.org) launched last week in Brussels as part of Green Week 2015, the annual conference on European environment policy organized by the European Commission.
The EBP project is a new initiative of the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) through which European on-line bird recording schemes will collaborate to research European-wide seasonal distributional changes, migratory patterns, and migration timing of birds and to understand how these patterns are changing over time. EBP data for Britain and Ireland come from the BirdTrack project (www.birdtrack.net) which allows birdwatchers to record their observations on-line and to contribute to conservation science.
Gabriel Gargallo, EBP project coordinator, commented, “The EBP project will allow a better knowledge of the patterns of bird distribution in space and time across Europe and, thus, help to properly address several issues of high concern in relation to bird conservation and management.”
Unlike more traditional monitoring projects, which focus on structured data collection, online bird recording portals aim to obtain year-round data from the relatively unstructured but intensive and widespread activities of birdwatchers. However, the vast amount of data contained in these portals and the sheer amplitude of their combined geographical and taxonomic coverage offer great possibilities for research on the temporal and spatial distribution of birds across large geographical areas. To unfold the full potential of these possibilities, the EBP objective is to create a common data repository and to promote protocols and mechanisms for data sharing and analyses at a European scale.
To help attain these goals the EBP project already includes 29 partners running on-line bird recording schemes in 21 different European countries. The partnership involves biodiversity data centres and key ornithological institutions in their respective countries, enabling the collection of high quality monitoring data from thousands of volunteer birdwatchers and turning this information in sound science.
Dr Stephen Baillie, Senior Research Fellow at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) commented “The timing and patterns of bird migration across Europe are changing rapidly in relation to climate and other environmental factors. Thanks to over 100,000 observers from 21 countries, submitting in the region of 30 million new bird records every year, this new project will allow us to study those changes and to identify improved conservation strategies.”
He added,
“Bird migration is one of the great spectacles of the natural world. This new web portal provides novel visualisations of the patterns and speed of bird migration across Europe, which will be of interest to many people from dedicated birdwatchers to those who simply look forward to the arrival of the first Swallows each spring. As the project develops we plan to add many more species and to provide migration maps in close to real time.”
Thanks to the collaboration with the leading location intelligence and data visualization platform, CartoDB (www.cartodb.com), we have been able to layer multiple data sets spatially and chronologically, transforming information into great insights. As a result, the EBP demo viewer (www.eurobirdportal.org) will allow free access to thousands of amazing animated distributional maps that highlight the scope and potential of the EBP project and its future developments.
The EBP demo viewer will initially depict animated weekly distributional maps of 15 different bird species for four years (2010-2013), but during the next six months it will progressively reach 50 species and include data from 2014. Users will be able to select two animated maps of any species; year and type can be selected to be shown simultaneously for direct comparison (more than 1.5 million different map combinations will be available to choose from by the end of the year).
Currently, EBP efforts are focussed on displaying data in real time and on developing modelling approaches that will allow sound analyses of changes in distribution patterns with respect to climate, land-use and other relevant factors.
See teaser at https://youtu.be/-7KVhyt7Rsw
