The concept of North American Bird Phenology Program was simple: digitize the millions of paper bird observation records collected from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. These records from before the time of rapid climate change are invaluable … but only if they’re converted to digital form.
The challenge: These records could be transcribed only by hand — and only by volunteers.
I categorize this project as “climate community science,” since this is probably the main motivation for initiating it. But it also helps birds, too, though, partly because climate change is one of the biggest challenges to birds, but also because it shows how bird populations are changing. This is important information to have if we want to help birds.
It was also a way to honor the contributions of all those people so long ago who couldn’t have imagined how valuable their efforts would be – people who could not have conceived of the idea of digitizing their records!
It was always nice when I found cards from the Syracuse area from so long ago.
As of October 2011, I had transcribed 3,023 cards out of 501,385 transcribed by everyone and the 693,754 that have so far been scanned into the system. As of February 2014, I had transcribed 6,778 cards out of 1,001,343 transcribed by everyone and the 1,042,494 that have so far been scanned into the system, waiting for transcription. As of January 2015, I had reached my 8,000 card mark!
Unfortunately, I believe around 2017 or 2018 this project was marked as “completed,” even though only about a million of the six million cards had been transcribed. I suspect they lost their funding for this.
Resources
- Audubon:
- Three Generations of Citizen Science: The Futurist – Tells the story behind the data cards and the effort to digitize them.