Powered by Data from eBird and NASA, These Maps Are a Game-Changer for Conservation

This map shows the changing abundance and locations of Barn Swallows throughout the year. Yellow areas have the fewest Barn Swallows and purple areas have the most (up to 437 swallows during a one-hour count)

In December 2018, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology released the first in a series of new maps, charts, and data resources that reveal unprecedented details about not just where birds are, but how their numbers and habitats change through the seasons and years.

Unlocking this wealth of information required more than 114 years of cloud computing time, provided by Amazon Web Services, to process observations recorded in eBird by more than 120,000 bird watchers across North America, along with satellite imagery from NASA.

The result: a captivating, data-driven portrait of the changing movements and numbers of birds—showing the full sweep of birds across the entire continent down to your own neighborhood.

The new data-driven maps and visualizations, called “eBird Status and Trends,” are powerful new tools for science and conservation, realizing the original vision for eBird to monitor the health of bird populations across the continent in near real time.

Maps and additional data-driven visualizations for 107 bird species are available and free to download, with more regions and species to come, thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, Wolf Creek Charitable Foundation, Leon Levy Foundation, NASA, Amazon Web Services, Institute for Computational Sustainability, and supporters of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

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