eBird Expands to Mexico

New aVerAves web site taps into bird sightings from Mexico

By Eduardo Iñigo-Elias and Mike Powers

Since 2002, bird watchers have helped improve our knowledge about birds in the United States and Canada by entering their sightings into eBird. These observations are used to track changes in bird distribution and abundance to better understand and conserve the birds that share our landscapes.

Now for the first time, bird watchers in Mexico can also submit their observations online, through a new web site called aVerAves, meaning “to watch birds.” Available at www.ebird.org/aVerAves in English and Spanish, aVerAves utilizes eBird technology to survey and monitor birds in Mexico. These data will be used to increase our knowledge of poorly known birds in the Neotropics and expand our view of migratory birds across the entire continent. Observations submitted to aVerAves from Mexico will also be incorporated and displayed in eBird along with data from the United States and Canada. aVerAves is a joint project involving the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO), the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the National Audubon Society.

More than 63 percent of the 800 bird species that breed in Canada and the United States migrate to their wintering grounds in the Neotropics. Many of these species are undergoing declines in the face of human-caused changes throughout their ranges. Helping to fill in the gaps from Mexico, aVerAves is an important step in effective conservation and management of these species.

Checklists submitted through the aVerAves web site will also provide distribution and abundance information about poorly known species breeding in Mexico. The Neotropics are home to more than 3,700 bird species and 70 percent of the world?s bird families, 31 of which are endemic. No other realm of the planet comes close in diversity or number of endemic birds.

Like eBird, aVerAves brings scientists and the general public together in collecting data and exploring the results. Whether you live in Mexico or are traveling there, you can contribute your bird sightings to aVerAves or to eBird, which now includes Mexican locations and checklists. The information all goes into the same database and is accessible through both web sites. As more data come in from Mexico, summaries, graphs, and maps will display movements of birds from Canada and the United States to Mexico and the distribution of birds that breed in Mexico.

The launch of aVerAves is the first step in linking information across the Americas. Now we are hoping to help develop similar tools for the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. A tremendous need exists for bird-monitoring tools in Latin America. The simplicity and far-reaching capabilities of eBird and aVerAves offer exciting possibilities for developing similar online programs that will continue to cut across political and cultural barriers and encompass the varied landscapes inhabited by birds.

Eduardo Iñigo-Elias is coordinator for the Lab?s Neotropical Bird Conservation program. Mike Powers is project leader of eBird.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu