Avian Knowledge Network

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year grant to the Lab?s Information Technologies group and Cornell?s Computer Science Department to create a new Avian Knowledge Network on the Internet. Currently more than 60 million North American bird records are held by different institutions, but there is no way to search and access them as a unified resource. The grant will help develop the technology to allow access to all these data, including the Breeding Bird Survey, the Lab?s citizen-science projects, and banding and monitoring records from bird observatories and universities. The grant will also fund the development of online tools for maps, graphs, and analysis.

"The Avian Knowledge Network will amount to one of the largest and longest-running time-series data sets on the environment in existence,? says Steve Kelling, director of Information Technologies. ?Once we?ve got that, all kinds of things can be done, from the simple—such as giving detailed maps of distribution—all the way to cutting-edge analyses that can be used to study the effects of climate, habitat, land-use changes, and other factors on the distribution and abundance of birds.?

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