Description
The North American Bird Phenology Program, part of the USA-National Phenology Network, was a network of volunteer observers who recorded information on first arrival dates, maximum abundance, and departure dates of migratory birds across North America. Active between 1880 and 1970, the program was coordinated by the Federal government and sponsored by the American Ornithologists' Union. It exists now as a historic collection of six million migration card observations, illuminating almost a century of migration patterns and population status of birds. Today, in an innovative project to curate the data and make them publically available, the records are being scanned and placed on the internet, where volunteers worldwide transcribe these records and add them into a database for analysis. From the close of the program in 1970 Chan Robbins continued to make sure the records were kept safe. In 2008, Sam Droege and Jessica Zelt, with help from the National Phenology Network revived the migration program and dubbed it the North American Bird Phenology Program. The program that started as Wells Cooke’s research in the Mississippi Valley and grew through the help of the American Ornithologist Union to become the Division of Economic Ornithology would later become the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The records are now being digitized and with help from citizen scientists the information will be combined in an online database accessible to the public. What began as a quest to find out how and why birds migrate, turned into one of our Nations greatest and longest running programs.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 1,034,886 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
USGS. 2015. North American Bird Phenology Program (1880-1970) species occurrence data of birds in the United States.
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is United States Geological Survey. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: ce9d17f0-de7f-4518-83a6-690c615dd8d9. United States Geological Survey publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by GBIF-US.
Keywords
Metadata; Aves; birds; phenology; Occurrence
External data
The resource data is also available in other formats
| Wikipedia: USGS Bird Phenology Program | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Bird_Phenology_Program html html |
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Contacts
- Metadata Provider ●
- Originator ●
- User ●
- Point Of Contact
- Wildlife Biologist
- BARC - EAST, Building 308, Room 124, 10300 Baltimore Avenue
- +1 (301) 497-5840
- Originator
- Geographer
- Metadata Provider
- 12201 Sunrise Valley Drive
- +1 703-648-4385
Geographic Coverage
This bounding box is not precise.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [17.11, -169.26], North East [70.45, -66.64] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
539 bird taxa.
| Class | Aves (birds) |
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Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 1870-03-21 / 1981-03-29 |
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Project Data
No Description available
| Title | US Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center - Bird Phenology Program |
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| Funding | USGS |
The personnel involved in the project:
- Custodian Steward
Bibliographic Citations
- North American Bird Phenology Program Bibliography. https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bpp/Bibliography2.cfm
Additional Metadata
During processing of the dataset, because State, County, and Water Body data were not provided in the original, calculated State, County, and Marine Exclusive Economic Zone values were added, where applicable. During processing of the dataset, non-native status information was added, were applicable, in the establishmentMeans field. Two of the original 1,034,888 records were deleted during processing because their lat/lon values placed them (incorrectly) near the South Pole. Total records: 1,034,886. Total number of unique taxa: 537.
| Alternative Identifiers | ce9d17f0-de7f-4518-83a6-690c615dd8d9 |
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| https://doi.org/10.15468/w4cjwm | |
| https://bison.usgs.gov/ipt/resource?r=usgs-pwrc-bird-phenology-program |