Press Releases

Of Birds and Bytes

Avian Knowledge Network receives new grant from Leon Levy Foundation

November 5, 2007

The Leon Levy Foundation has awarded a new grant to the Avian Knowledge Network (www.avianknowledge.net), a massive database that pools bird observations that birders and professionals contribute through citizen-science projects, bird banding, and other surveys. The Avian Knowledge Network is the brainchild of an interdisciplinary group from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics at Cornell University.

The Levy Foundation grant will fund the work of Cornell University graduate student Daria Sorokina, who developed a new technique for creating more accurate computer models using data from the Avian Knowledge Network. These models help scientists understand the complicated relationship between birds and thousands of features in the environment that affect them, such as trees, water, predators, and food. By combining these variables with massive numbers of bird observations, scientists see large scale patterns that could not be found otherwise. These patterns can then be visualized with computer-generated maps.

Shelby White, founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, said, "My interest in birds stretches back to my childhood days in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The Leon Levy Foundation is pleased to support the Avian Knowledge Network in this project, which should add significantly to our understanding of birds and their environment."

The Avian Knowledge Network has accumulated 36 million bird data records over the past three years and the avalanche of information continues. "By integrating bird information, statistics, and computer science, we're trying to answer large-scale questions about bird populations," says Steve Kelling, director of Information Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Kelling says people are accessing the data daily, fueling scientific inquiry into birds across the continent, thanks to bird watchers everywhere.

The Leon Levy Foundation, (leonlevyfoundation.org), founded in 2004, is a private, not-for-profit foundation created from the estate of Leon Levy, a legendary investor with a longstanding commitment to philanthropy. The Foundation's overarching goal is to continue the tradition of humanism characteristic of Mr. Levy by supporting scholarship at the highest level, ultimately advancing knowledge and improving the lives of individuals and society at large.