December 20, 2010

The Excel spreadsheet version 6.5 of The Clements Checklist of Birds of the World is now available for download. Although the text version of the update is not yet available, we did not want to delay in making the electronic version public.

There are a few substantive changes to the spreadsheet. First, the year of extinction is provided as a separate column, although in some cases the year was not accessible and these are represented with "xxxx." We hope to fill some of these in in version 6.6, due out in August 2011 (not December). Second, we are providing two fields to indicate changes since Clements 6.4. These paired fields, "Change" and "Change comment" should clarify what changes have occurred since the last edition. References cited in the "Change comments" field will be provided in the online version of the changes and corrections, which will follow the format of past updates and is due out in early January 2011. We apologize for any inconvenience this slight delay may cause.

Stay tuned!

The spreadsheet now contains 13 fields (data columns); the new columns are marked with an asterisk:

Sort 6.5 -- * reflecting the arrangement of species in this edition of Clements Checklist

Sort 6.4 -- reflecting the arrangement of species in last year's edition of Clements Checklist

Page 6.0 -- reflecting the position of the species in the last print edition

Category -- reflecting whether the entry on that line is a species, a subspecies, or a group

Extinct -- an entry in this column means that the species or subspecies is extinct

Extinct year -- *  reflects the year the species went extinct; "xxxx"
is used when the data was not readily accessible

Scientific name

English name

Range

Order

Family

Change -- * note on a change that occurred from Version 6.4

Change comment -- * an explanation for the change; these comments will appear also in the online, text version

Thanks to all for your support.

Thomas S. Schulenberg (Avian Taxonomist), and Marshall J. Iliff, Brian L. Sullivan, and Christopher L. Wood (eBird Project Leaders)