Feedback on 'State Needs Alerts'

eBirders

Yesterday we launched the next wave of eBird alerts--the State Needs Alerts. The goal of these alerts is to send you notification on birds being reported in a given state, that you have not yet personally reported to eBird--essentially comparing your lists with all the new reports being submitted on a daily basis. See news item here: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/state_needs_alert.

We'll be moving on to a county alert with similar functionality next, and would love to get your feedback on these state alerts before going forward. One of the big things, at least in California and a few other states with a lot of introduced species, is the fact that if I (or you) don't report the introduced exotics, they'll show up on your needs alert. So because I haven't reported all the parrots from LA County, those always show up on my alerts. Kind of annoying, but I can get around it. The alerts did drive me to finally go out and see the nearby Tufted Duck!

Brian and Team eBird

The grand plan for 'eBird Alerts'

eBirders

We recently launched a new service called 'eBird Alerts'. The first alert we have available is the "ABA Rarities" alert, which lists all of the rarities reported in the ABA area of Code 3 and higher. This simple feed will keep you up to date on all the rare birds seen recently, like the Ivory Gull in Georgia (!) or the first North American record of Amazon Kingfisher from TX a few days ago.

We're soon going to launch another service called "State Needs Alert". This one will compare your list of birds in a given state against all the new reports coming into eBird for that state, and list the reports of species you have yet to see in that state. This tool will be great for people interested in keeping abreast of their state lists. Next iteration of this will be "County Needs Alert", as in some places (e.g., California) counties are huge, and people are really interested in things at this level.

My question to this group is, now that we've started heading in this direction, that is feeding data directly from eBird into your email inboxes (at your request only of course), what types of other feeds might you find interesting?

Thanks

Team eBird

Brian, Chris, and Marshall

Contest for free BirdsEye iPhone apps

Just in case you hadn't seen it, the eBird homepage is now featuring news of a contest we are running next week (24-31 Jan) which will award as a prize 20 versions of BirdsEye (the cool new app that draws on eBird data). All of us at Team eBird are big fans of this new application, which puts much of the best bird-finding info from eBird in the hands of the BirdsEye user. With a commitment to data entry coming down the pike too, we are hopeful that BirdsEye will become an even more useful tool for eBirders in the future.

The full story on the eBird homepage gives details of the contest (basically, the 20 eBirders submitting the most checklists over that time frame will win free versions of the app). The story also provides a summary of the app and what it does, as well as our Team eBird review.

If you have an iPhone though, you might as well register! The app sells for $20, and we don't yet know what kind of totals would be required to win!

If you don;t yet have BirdsEye, we highly recommend it. If you already own BirdsEye, we'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Better yet, comment on it in the App Store.

eBird switches to a new database server

eBirders

For the past several months we've been preparing to migrate the massive eBird database and all the front-end functionality over to a newer, more powerful server. Thanks to the work of all our IS staff, that migration was completed yesterday, and all went smoothly. eBird users woke up on Tuesday morning with lightning-fast response times on most of the eBird output tools, and the My eBird pages.

Sometimes we have to spend time working on the back-end of eBird and prioritize that over creating new and exciting functionality for the front-end users. Now that we have eBird back on a solid database platform, we can proceed forward with much of the development we've been putting off for some time. We hope to focus over the next several months on making world-wide data entry a reality for eBird users, as well as unveiling a few neat tools we have up our sleeves.

Thanks for continued support of the project,

Team eBird

Brian, Marshall and Chris

Parsing help

Our eBird bloggers include some of our most active, committed, and tech-savvy eBirders. It is this last element that we'd like to draw upon in this post, since it is really a call for help.

We periodically receive communications from birders who have years (even decades) of their bird notes in text form. Often in MS Word, or a similar format, these notes tend to be formatted in very regular ways which makes it possible to write some smart scripts to parse the information into a CSV or Excel file for eBird upload.

Unfortunately, the three eBird Project Leaders are pretty good with bird ID, but at the moment, none of us has the expertise to quickly and easily convert long text files into a CSV or Excel-compatible file that we can use via the eBird upload tool. An our eBird developers are busy developing RSS feeds and improving eBird queries and building other new cool stuff for the site itself, so we can't really draw on them.

We are wondering if there is anyone out there in the eBird Blogosphere that would have the expertise and willingness to assist us with converting text to CSV. Email Marshall directly at mji26@cornell.edu if you think you can help or have ideas (or if you have bird records in this format that you'd like to convert). Thanks!

Revealing personal locations--how do you feel about it?

eBirders

Over the past two years we've been developing tools that showcase our users, and in so doing we've made more and more of the eBird data easily accessible to the public. One of the things we've struggled with is whether or not to show people's personal locations on a map. If you look at the eBird "High Counts" output tool, you'll see a mix of locations listed there. The "hotspots" are linked to a Google Map, whereas people's personal locations have no map link. We thought this would be fine, but it turns out that we're getting a lot of complaints about it.

If you look at "High Counts" for a region and see one that interests you, don't you want to know where the high count occurred? The problem is that for personal locations we do not enforce any kind of naming standards, so there's lots of places like "My backyard" or "Jim's Place". The problem with this is that when there is a record of interest to the public, they can't make sense of that location name, nor can they click on a link to find out more about where it actually is.

On our Google Rare Bird Gadget we display all locations on maps, personal and shared. We have had few complaints about this. I'm wondering how you all feel about creating links to personal locations in all the eBird output tools so that people can learn more about your data? We will still have the "hide this" option to hide checklists so users with sensitive data can keep their information private if they wish. We'd love to hear your thoughts, comments and concerns.

Thanks

Brian Sullivan
Team eBird

eBird taxonomic revision

eBirders,

Has there ever been anything that you have wanted to enter in eBird but have been unable to? Something like "eider sp." or "booby sp.", a rare hybrid that you saw (like Glaucous x Great Black-backed Gull) or a subspecies group like "Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon)" (we already have that one).

The reason we ask is that we are revising our taxonomy now. We plan to expand the list of birds you can enter significantly, and have a list of recommendations from other eBirders which we will incorporate. If you have any birds you'd like to see in eBird, send any ideas like this to Marshall (mji26@cornell.edu).

NOTE: Before you send recommendations, please check to make sure we don;t already have the bird you are recommending. There are two ways to do this:

1) Download the eBird taxonomy and search for it here: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/about/ebird-taxonomy/eBird-taxonomy-1-049_28-Apr-2009.xls

2) Edit or submit a checklist, click "rare species" and type part of the bird name in the "Add a species" box. If you want to add a "sp.", just type "sp." and if you want to add a hybrid, just type hybrid, since you will get a list with all options containing that character string. Please remember, that we use a slash "/" for species pairs--thus, we use Short-billed/Long-billed Dowitcher rather than dowitcher sp. and Greater/Lesser Yellowlegs rather than yellowlegs sp.

Thanks!

-Marshall Iliff for Team eBird