eBird: Curating Citizen Science Data for Use by Diverse Communities

In this paper we describe eBird, a highly successful citizen science project. With over 150,000 participants worldwide and an accumulation of over 140,000,000 bird observations globally in the last decade, eBird has evolved into a major tool for scientific investigations in diverse fields such as ornithology, computer science, statistics, ecology and climate change. eBird’s impact in scientific research is grounded in careful data curation practices that pay attention to all stages of the data lifecycle, and attend to the needs of stakeholders engaged in that data lifecycle. We describe the important aspects of eBird, paying particular attention to the mechanisms to improve data quality; describe the data products that are available to the global community; investigate some aspects of the downloading community; and demonstrate significant results that derive from the use of openly-available eBird data. Received 22 October 2013 | Accepted 26 February 2014 Correspondence should be addressed to Carl Lagoze, 4444 North Quad, 105 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Email: [email protected] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 9 International Digital Curation Conference. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (UK) Licence, version 2.0. For details please see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/ International Journal of Digital Curation 2014, Vol. 9, Iss. 1, 71–82 71 http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.302 DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.302 72 | eBird: Curating Citizen Science Data doi:10.2218/ijdc.v9i1.302