The State of the Birds United States of America 2009

Foreword Birds Are Important Indicators of Our Nation’s Environmental Health The United States is blessed with diverse landscapes, a wealth of natural resources, and spectacular wildlife, including more than 800 bird species. Birds are a national treasure and a heritage we share with people around the world, as billions of migratory birds follow the seasons across oceans and continents. Our passion for nature is evident: Wildlife watching generates $122 billion in economic output annually, and one in every four American adults is a bird watcher. In the past 200 years, however, the U.S. human population has skyrocketed from about 8 million to 300 million. As we have harvested energy and food, grown industries, and built cities, we have often failed to consider the consequences to nature. During our history, we have lost a part of our natural heritage—and degraded and depleted the resources upon which our quality of life depends. We have lost more than half of our nation’s original wetlands, 98% of our tallgrass prairie, and virtually all virgin forests east of the Rockies. Since the birth of our nation, four American bird species have gone extinct, including the Passenger Pigeon, once the world’s most abundant bird. At least 10 more species are possibly extinct. Birds are bellwethers of our natural and cultural health as a nation— they are indicators of the integrity of the environments that provide us with clean air and water, fertile soils, abundant wildlife, and the natural resources on which our economic development depends. In the past 40 years, major public, private, and government initiatives have made strides for conservation. Has it been enough? How are birds faring? In an unprecedented partnership, government wildlife agencies and conservation groups have come together to produce this first comprehensive analysis of the state of our nation’s birds. The results are sobering: bird populations in many habitats are declining—a warning signal of the failing health of our ecosystems. Where we have been negligent too long, such as in Hawaii, we are on the verge of losing entire suites of unique and beautiful birds and native plant communities. At the same time, we see heartening evidence that birds can respond quickly and positively to conservation action. Many waterfowl species have undergone significant increases in the past 40 years, a testament to coordinated conservation efforts in wetlands. Through focused conservation efforts, we have brought magnificent Peregrine Falcons and Bald Eagles back from the brink of extinction. We ask you to join us in continuing to reverse the damage to our nation’s habitats and protect our remaining natural landscapes—the foundation upon which our precious resources, our wildlife, and the lives of our children depend. Cooperative conservation efforts among the government, conservation organizations, and ordinary citizens—private landowners, hunters, and bird watchers—really are making a difference

The State of the Birds 2011 Report on Public Lands and Waters: United States of America

Foreword Public Lands and Waters Are Essential for Birds Each year, the State of the Birds report provides important scientific data to a broad audience with a call to action to improve the conservation status of birds and the environment. This year’s report brings attention to the tremendous promise of public lands and waters for conserving America’s wildlife and habitats. The United States has a long history of conservation on public lands. More than one-third of U.S. lands and all of our oceans are publicly owned, including some of our nation’s most spectacular natural areas. These habitats support more than 1,000 bird species, one-third of which are endangered, threatened, or of conservation concern. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln established Yosemite as the first park set aside by the federal government specifically for public use and preservation. As environmental exploitation continued across unprotected lands, the Passenger Pigeon, once the world’s most abundant bird, was driven to extinction in the wild by the turn of the century. Recognizing that this loss meant “mankind was just so much poorer,” President Theodore Roosevelt championed the irreplaceable value of birds and other wildlife, and set aside 80 million acres for public land conservation, including the first National Wildlife Refuge in 1903. Today, more than 850 million acres of land and 3.5 million square miles of ocean are publicly owned, including more than 245 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management, 6,000 State Park units, 1,600 Marine Protected Areas, 550 National Wildlife Refuges, 350 military installations, 150 National Forests, and nearly 400 National Park Service units. These areas support our native bird species, many of which are declining, as described in the 2009 and 2010 State of the Birds reports. This year’s report provides the nation’s first assessment of the distribution of birds on public lands and helps public agencies identify which species have significant potential for conservation in each habitat. This assessment used high-performance computing techniques to analyze a massive data set on bird distribution from citizen-science participants across the U.S. (eBird), along with the first comprehensive database of public land ownership (Protected Areas Database of the U.S.). The state of our birds is a measurable indicator of how well we are doing as stewards of our environment. The signal is clear. Greater conservation efforts on public lands and waters are needed to realize the vision of a nation sustained economically and spiritually by abundant natural resources and spectacular wildlife. President Obama’s new initiative, “America’s Great Outdoors,” recognizes that throughout our nation’s history, conservation actions have been grounded in the premise that our natural heritage belongs to the people, and that its protection is shared by all Americans. The call to action for bird conservation in this report goes hand in hand with “America’s Great Outdoors,” which empowers all Americans to share in the responsibility to conserve, restore, and provide better access to our lands and waters in order to leave a healthy, vibrant outdoor legacy for generations yet to come

Next-Generation Field Guides

To conserve species, we must first identify them. Field researchers, land managers, educators, and citizen scientists need up-to-date and accessible tools to identify organisms, organize data, and share observations. Emerging technologies complement traditional, book-form field guides by providing users with a wealth of multimedia data. We review technical innovations of next-generation field guides, including Web-based and stand-alone applications, interactive multiple-access keys, visual-recognition software adapted to identify organisms, species checklists that can be customized to particular sites, online communities in which people share species observations, and the use of crowdsourced data to refine machine-based identification algorithms. Next-generation field guides are user friendly; permit quality control and the revision of data; are scalable to accommodate burgeoning data; protect content and privacy while allowing broad public access; and are adaptable to ever-changing platforms and browsers. These tools have great potential to engage new audiences while fostering rigorous science and an appreciation for nature.Organismic and Evolutionary Biolog

Engagement in the Data Collection Phase of the Scientific Process is Key for Enhancing Learning Gains

Most programs that create opportunities for the public to engage in scientific research invite the public to collect data, but there is a call to expand opportunities for engagement in additional aspects of the scientific process. One reason behind this call is the hypothesis that people who participate to a greater degree in the scientific process experience more robust learning outcomes. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a quasi-experiment by using a pre-post survey design and comparing varying degrees of participation in a Bird Cams Lab investigation. Bird Cams Lab was a virtual space in which the public worked with scientists to design and implement co-created investigations involving live streaming or recorded footage of birds. We found that the higher the degree of participation in the investigation, the greater the increase in content knowledge, self-efficacy, and self-reported improvement in science inquiry skills. Interestingly, involvement in data collection was associated with the greatest gains in content knowledge and self-efficacy regardless of involvement in other parts of the scientific process. For programs with limited funding and resources that seek to increase participants’ content knowledge and self-efficacy, focusing efforts on supporting data collection may be the most impactful

Bird Cams Lab Biological Data

Thank you to the thousands of volunteers who participated in the Bird Cams Lab investigations. Thank you as well to Eliot Miller for working with the Bird Cams Lab community in the Battling Birds: Panama Edition investigation and Wesley Hochachkafor advising on how to work with the data. A special thank you to the Cornell Lab’s Web Communications team for designing the live data tagging tool and online collaboration spaces that made data collection and exploration possible.Bird Cams Lab was a project funded by the National Science Foundation that ran from 2018 to 2021, providing opportunities for the public to work with scientists to co-create scientific investigations using online wildlife cams. Participants had the opportunity to be a part of each stage of the scientific process: making observations,posing questions to investigate, designing the study, collecting data, exploring results, and sharing findings. There were six investigations, and a total of more than 500,000 observations. Participants collected data from archived video footage on the Zooniverse platform, and in real time using a data tagging tool on the Bird Cams Lab and Bird Cams website. The data are intended to be open access and we encourage anyone to use the information to explore or conduct research. We have organized the data for each investigation in its own folder. When using the data, please acknowledge the contributions and funding under Acknowledgements and use the suggested citation. To learn more about the Bird Cams Lab project, visit https://birdcamslab.allaboutbirds.org/. To access the code used to work with this data, visit https://bitbucket.org/cornellbirds/bcl-data-workflow/src/live/.For any questions about the data, please contact Bird Cams ([email protected]).For three investigations (Battling Birds, Hawk Talk, and Battling Birds: Panama Edition), participants collected data from archived video clips on the Zooniverse.org platform, development of which is funded by generous support, including a Global Impact Award from Google, and by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.The overall Bird Cams Lab work was funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant #1713225. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

Bird Cams Lab Video Data

Thank you to the thousands of volunteers who participated in the Bird Cams Lab investigations. Thank you as well to Eliot Miller for working with the Bird Cams Lab community in the Battling Birds: Panama Edition investigation and Wesley Hochachka for advising on how to work with the data. A special thank you to the Cornell Lab’s Web Communications team for designing the live data tagging tool and online collaboration spaces that made data collection and exploration possible.Bird Cams Lab was a project funded by the National Science Foundation that ran from 2018 to 2021, providing opportunities for the public to work with scientists to co-create scientific investigations using online wildlife cams. Participants had the opportunity to be a part of each stage of the scientific process: making observations, posing questions to investigate, designing the study, collecting data, exploring results, and sharing findings. There were six investigations, and a total of more than 500,000 observations. Participants collected data from archived video footage on the Zooniverse platform, and in real time using a data tagging tool on the Bird Cams Lab and Bird Cams website. We have organized the 10-15-second video clips by investigation. To access the observational data, see https://doi.org/10.7298/fxqt-zw38. When using the data, please acknowledge the contributions and funding under Acknowledgements and use the suggested citation. To learn more about the Bird Cams Lab project, visit https://birdcamslab.allaboutbirds.org/. For any questions about the data, please contact Bird Cams ([email protected]).For three investigations (Battling Birds, Hawk Talk, and Battling Birds: Panama Edition), participants collected data from archived video clips on the Zooniverse.org platform, development of which is funded by generous support, including a Global Impact Award from Google, and by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The overall Bird Cams Lab work was funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant #1713225. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

Next-Generation Field Guides

To conserve species, we must first identify them. Field researchers, land managers, educators, and citizen scientists need up-to-date and accessible tools to identify organisms, organize data, and share observations. Emerging technologies complement traditional, book-form field guides by providing users with a wealth of multimedia data. We review technical innovations of next-generation field guides, including Web-based and stand-alone applications, interactive multiple-access keys, visual-recognition software adapted to identify organisms, species checklists that can be customized to particular sites, online communities in which people share species observations, and the use of crowdsourced data to refine machine-based identification algorithms. Next-generation field guides are user friendly; permit quality control and the revision of data; are scalable to accommodate burgeoning data; protect content and privacy while allowing broad public access; and are adaptable to ever-changing platforms and browsers. These tools have great potential to engage new audiences while fostering rigorous science and an appreciation for nature.This article is from BioScience 63 (2013): 891–899, doi:10.1525/bio.2013.63.11.8.</p