By Mukta Patil
Fratercula cirrhata (Tufted Puffin - click here)
Every year in May, (click here) Christopher Wood, assistant director of information science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is occupied by one question: “If everybody around the world were to all go looking for birds on the same day, how many species could we find?”
Today, May 4, is that day. Wood is searching for avian life in the marshes of Alabama. Meanwhile, I peer through binoculars into the mists of Edgewood Park in Redwood City, California, with avid birder Whitney Mortimer. Seventeen miles west, Alvaro Jaramillo has left Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay, hoping to see birds only found at sea.
Wood, Mortimer, Jaramillo, and I are all participating in Global Big Day, a 24-hour birdwatching marathon designed to get as many people as possible outside, recording the birds they see. We are all using a mobile app called eBird, managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, to record our sightings.
On any day of the year, eBird functions as the largest biodiversity-related citizen science project in the world. Users input more than 100 million bird sightings each year, while the app automatically collects data like the date, distance, and time the birder was out for.
With this information, the team at Cornell is able to gather information about things like bird distribution, population, and habitat use. “We're interested in understanding what's happening with a biological system,” Wood says. “And in order to do that, we also need to understand what's happening with the birdwatcher as part of the observation process.”...
