Using eBird Data for Research

In India, eBird adoption started in 2013 and there are now (March 2022) 30 million observations, 1.6 million images, 80,000 audio, and 10,000 videos. This mammoth yet free database is being increasingly used by scientists and citizens for the purpose of bird research – slicing and analyzing the data in multiple ways to bring out new knowledge on our birds. In 2018, R Kannan and his colleagues from Chennai presented the true winter distribution of Forest Wagtail around Chennai, comparing it against the seasonality in other districts using eBird bar charts. V.S. Jose and P.O.Nameer used eBird data to model the future distribution of Indian Peafowl in Kerala. Priyamvada Bagaria and her associates in the Zoological Survey of India used data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (99% of the data on GBIF from India is from eBird) for the risk assessment strategy of Himalayan Wildfowls (Galliformes). Media from the Macaulay Library has been used for understanding the distribution of the various morphs of Variable Wheatear and taxonomic relevance of the vocalisations of Greater Flamebacks.

As of today, there are 41 (and growing) publications on Indian birds that have used the data from eBird and/or Macaulay Library and analysed them to create new summaries. They are listed by year of publication in this link: https://ebird.org/india/about/publications

However, this does not include a number of publications that used a few eBird checklists or the Macaulay Library links directly as reference. If you know other publications that have downloaded eBird or Macaulay Library data to create summaries, please send us the references and we will update the page. You can email us at [email protected]

Useful links (Note: In each link, you can apply various filters)

Download eBird Dataset: Visit https://ebird.org/data/download

Download Bar chart Histogram: Visit https://ebird.org/barchart?r=IN&yr=all&m= and look for download histogram data.

Download Macaulay Library Meta Data: Visit https://ebird.org/media/india/catalog?taxonCode=taweag1&region=India%20(IN)&regionCode=IN&q=Tawny%20Eagle%20-%20Aquila%20rapax and look for Save Spreadsheet (limited to 10,000 records)