About

What is NADC?

 
The Northeast Avian Data Center (NADC) is a cooperative effort by government and non-government institutions, focused on understanding the patterns and dynamics of bird populations in the northeastern United States. NADC does this by collecting and organizing bird monitoring data from groups throughout the region and providing was of accessing the data, both directly and through visualizations and explorations.

Literally hundreds of bird monitoring datasets exist in just the northeastern states alone, and NADC is a cooperative effort to try to bring the disparate sources together in one place to make them more accessible and expand their relevance to researchers, educators, analysts, and conservationists in the Northeast and beyond.

As an Avian Knowledge Network (AKN) node, all data collected through NADC is shared directly with the AKN and thus available throughout either site.

The goals of NADC are as follows:

1) To provide secure, persistent archives for bird monitoring data and descriptive metadata in the Northeast region.

2) To store those data in an easily accessible and interoperable format and share those data with the AKN.

3) To employ visualization tools to provide summary views of the data. These tools may be site-specific or may be more broadly applied to the entire hemisphere-wide AKN dataset.

4) To educate the public about bird population dynamics in the Northeast, avian research and monitoring projects and conservation efforts, and

5) To provide guidance to the bird monitoring community on the topics of sound data management and archiving and to provide support and feedback from Northeastern partners to the AKN.

The AKN is organizing observation-based bird monitoring in three fundamental ways. First, we are developing new ways to discover these data by displaying metadata in the bird monitoring data registry (BMDR). Second, we are expanding existing data schemas to organize these data through the bird monitoring data exchange (BMDE). Third, we are building the technical infrastructure to allow access to these data through a federated data grid environment. For more information follow the links below.

Who are we?

The Northeast Avian Data Center is supported and funded by the Northeast Coordinated Bird Monitoring Partnership. The Northeast Coordinated Bird Monitoring partnership is a cooperative initiative administered by the American Bird Conservancy in collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

The project was developed by Northeast Partners In Flight, Northeast Shorebird Conservation Plan and Mid-Atlantic/New England/Maritimes Waterbird Conservation Plan, in concert with the US North American Bird Conservation Initiative's Monitoring Subcommittee. It is made possible by a Multistate Conservation Grant awarded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, with assistance from the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. We gratefully acknowledge the Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration Programs of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which funds the Multistate Conservation Program.

NADC serves as a node to the Avian Knowledge Network (AKN). Most of the AKN's personnel are at Cornell University, including researchers and staff at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and faculty and students from Cornell University's Departments of Computer Science and Statistics. Active partnerships with researchers and staff at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, Redwood Sciences Lab of the United States Forest Service, and Bird Studies Canada, have also been integral to the development of the AKN and NADC.

The AKN coordinates its activities across many bird observation data resources, and provide data to GBIF and ORNIS and is involved in international efforts to develop biodiversity information standards.

Current funding is from the National Science Foundation and includes:

• SEI+II:Ecological Discovery & Inference: Tools for Data-driven Exploration and Testing of Observational Data.
• DBI: Multi-Scaled Data in Ecology: Scale Dependent Patterns in the Environment
• ITR-(ASE+EVS)- (dmc+sim): Tracking Environmental Change through the Data Resources of the Bird-monitoring Community

What kinds of data are available?

The AKN is bringing together observation data on birds. This includes data from bird-monitoring, bird-banding, and broad-scale citizen-based bird-surveillance programs.

All of the observation data are unified within a distributed information architecture that is constantly expanding. All data can be made accessible, and are archived in Cornell University's data management infrastructure.

Additionally, the AKN has gathered over 1300 environmental, climate, and human demographic variables that are linked to all AKN bird observation locations.

What can you do with the data?

You can explore the data resources of the AKN via interactive maps that allow you to view the distribution of bird populations during any time of the year and across all of the Western Hemisphere or within user-defined geographic extents.

You can explore the relationship between birds and the variables that influence their occurrence via data mining techniques that rank variable importance.

You can explore an individual species pattern of distribution or the species richness of a particular location via dynamically generated summary tables and graphs.

Finally, much of the observational data can be directly accessed and downloaded.

How can you contribute?

NADC is interested in any bird observational data from within the Northeast region. If you are interested in contributing please review the instructions under the Contribute tab. If you have any questions please email Marshall Iliff.

We are also looking for examples of how the AKN is being used. If you have developed a data visualization or analysis using the AKN data please tell us!