Friday, October 7, 2011

Check out eBird Version 3 – The ultimate birding tool

As you may know from reading my blog, I have been using eBird for the past 12-14 months and am totally hooked! eBird is for everyone! In fact, over the next year I will be having monthly posts on how to use eBird--both how to submit useful data and get amazingly useful information out of eBird. My very next post will be "What I learned about Ruddy Turnstones from eBird." In November I will present an eBird tutorial on finding Pinyon Jays.

Thus I am excited to post the following announcement from the eBird team:



If you haven’t been to eBird (www.ebird.org) in a while, it’s time for another look. Over the past few months we’ve updated eBird so that it’s easier to use and more useful than ever to the birding community. eBird can help you find birds through our “Alerts” or by exploring our newly revised mapping tools and bar charts. Recording and keeping track of your birds is easier than ever with a completely redesigned data entry system and our automated listing pages (My eBird). Most importantly, you’ll become part of a growing community of tens of thousands of birders around the world whose data are now being used in real science and conservation. Best of all – it’s free!

eBird Version 3 includes:

  • Global scope—enter and explore observations from anywhere around the world
  • Streamlined data entry—getting your data into the system is faster and more customizable than ever
  • Improved range maps—explore interactive range maps for any bird in the world
  • Alerts system—get customized reports about birds of interest to you in a region
  • eBird Top 100—find out how your totals rank among other birders in any region
  • Birding + Science connection—by participating, your data become available to the science and conservations communities

We’re proud of the new developments at eBird, and we hope you’ll take the time to take the new tools for a test spin. Even if you don’t enter data, you can still explore the information submitted by other eBirders. Moving forward we’ll continue to develop eBird as the ultimate tool to serve the birding community, while always ensuring that the data we collect for science is of the highest possible quality. Join the flock, become an eBirder!