The View from the Mezzanine

By Tim Gallagher

Photo credit: Jon Reis

Steve Kelling, director of the Lab’s Information Technologies group, peers out from his eyrie on the third-floor mezzanine, where his staff creates technological marvels on a near-daily basis.

In his office on the third-floor mezzanine, overlooking Sapsucker Woods Pond, Steve Kelling is right where he wants to be—the best birding spot in the entire Johnson Center. From this strategic lookout, he has a spectacular view of the pond with its waterfowl and wading birds, and he’s at eye-level with the songbird-rich forest canopy and the old snag at the far side of the pond, a favorite spot for Ospreys and other raptors. Like many of the Lab staff, Kelling is an avid birder. A longtime member of the Sapsuckers—the Lab’s ace big-day team—Kelling spends a large part of his free time gazing through binoculars, in search of interesting birds.

When he’s not birding, he is guru-in-chief of the Lab’s Information Technologies (IT) program. Kelling’s talented group of programmers deals on a daily basis with creating technological marvels on the computer. To see what I mean, just visit the Lab’s web site at www.birds.cornell.edu. There you’ll find a host of interactive features to enhance your knowledge and enjoyment of birds, such as eBird—a joint Lab of Ornithology/Audubon project that allows you to add your daily bird sightings to a huge national database. Using eBird, you can perform real-time queries of the database and get the information you’re after, including maps, satellite photographs, and graphs within seconds.

According to Kelling, the Internet was made for the Lab of Ornithology. “The Lab has such a long history of engaging the public in citizen science,” he says. “The World Wide Web extends our reach much further so that we can begin to collect data from the thousands of people across the continent who keep records of the birds they see.”

“Birding with a Purpose” is the catchphrase at IT. You’re going out and finding birds for your personal enjoyment anyway, but using eBird you’re also compiling vital data that will be put to use by scientists and conservationists. But why is this information on bird sightings so important? Because so many gaps exist in our knowledge of the ranges, population dynamics, and movements of birds—even common species. To design effective conservation strategies and management guidelines we need to know where a species lives, how abundant it is, and whether its numbers are rising, falling, or remaining static. By engaging thousands—or perhaps even millions—of bird enthusiasts in data gathering over a period of years, we’ll amass a long-term database that will become a powerful tool for conservation.

Another ground-breaking Internet feature, recently launched by the Lab, is “All About Birds,” an online guide to North American birds. Using information from the Birds of North America series, All About Birds offers natural history accounts on more than 200 species as well as photographs, range maps, and vocalizations. “It shows you how different birds occur in different habitats, tells you about good areas to bird across the country, and provides up-to-date conservation information,” says Kelling. Eventually, every species of North American bird will be covered in this handy online guide.

Kelling has a broad vision for the future of the Lab’s Information Technologies program. He hopes to bring bird watching and ornithology into the world of high-performance computing. The IT group is establishing partnerships with large supercomputing groups such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Why is this a good thing? Because the analyzing of data will be speeded up to a degree nearly unimaginable in the past.

“Lab researchers recently analyzed a table of FeederWatch data, and it took almost a week to do it because of all the covariants involved,” says Kelling. “The problem is, they were using a single processor. By using high-performance computing techniques, we could run the application in parallel, literally using hundreds or even thousands of processors to accomplish the work in a fraction of the time.”

The IT group is currently setting up a massive bird-monitoring network called the Avian Knowledge Network, which will allow anyone to have access to the largest environmental data set currently in existence—approximately 60 million records spanning a century. “As soon as we organize all of these data into a data grid, we’ll be able to use the same kind of supercomputers employed in physics and nuclear studies,” says Kelling. “This will allow us to begin asking questions in much greater detail about the effects of global climate change, habitat fragmentation, and other factors on bird populations—which species are increasing, which ones are decreasing.” This can only be a good thing for the scientists and conservationists working to save our threatened bird populations.