The World's Biggest Citizen Science Project

eBird, now the world's largest citizen science project with over 2 billion bird observations, is transforming ornithology by turning casual birders (and even TikTok-using kids) into vital contributors to global research and conservation. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been one of the most influential organizations in the world when it comes to encouraging people to engage in natural history projects. While some form of amateur involvement in science projects has been around since 1900, when the Audubon Society organized the first Christmas Bird Count, it was the Cornell Lab that formalized citizen science as a sound and reliable means of collecting data on birds.

It didn't take much thought to realize that one of the richest sources of information about birds resided in the notebooks virtually every birder has kept, often from childhood. It's a given that birdwatchers list everything. The problem is that zillions of such notebooks sit forgotten in drawers or in dusty boxes in the attic. If only all of that information could be gathered together, organized in sensible ways and then made available to anyone who wanted to use it. What a resource that would be!

After lots of trials and discussion, a small team at the Lab came up with the idea of eBird. It started in a humble way back in 2002, as simply somewhere birders could store their records in a central location. Today, 'humble' is no longer an appropriate description. In 2022, its 20th anniversary year, a total of more than 1.3 billion records had been received from more than 820,000 participants. In the month of August this year, reports eBird, 123,000 birders submitted 1.6 million lists of sightings. It has now hit a total of 2 billion bird observations since inception.

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