Last chance for the Data Challenge 2016

The eBird-India Data Challenge is an invitation to anyone interested to download the c. 4.5 million observations from India and make something new and interesting out of the collated information. The last date for submitting entries for the challenge has been extended to 31 December 2016. If data excites you, please consider taking part, and do tell your friends and colleagues too!

To whet your appetite, here is a graph showing the distribution of effort (measured by number of lists uploaded) across the roughly 6,600 people who have uploaded at least one Indian birdlist to eBird. As is common in projects like this, most activity tends to come from relatively few individuals, and there is a ‘long tail’ of people who, individually, upload rather few lists. As you can see from the graph, the two most active eBird users from India each contributed roughly 2% of all 245,000 lists from India. And taken together, the 150 most active contributors account for a full 50% of all lists! What lessons does this little analysis hold for those of us working to increase participation and data in eBird?

Rank-ordered plot of percentage of all lists uploaded by the 6,648 people who have contributed at least one Indian birdlist to eBird. The total number of such lists is 245,048. Observers are ranked on the horizontal axis in decreasing order of the number of lists they have uploaded.