Any data set that deals with observations of birds is appropriate for the AKN. These data can be in any format and can be attempting to answer any question. The fundamental requirements are only data that include species, date and location.

The AKN specializes in federating existing datasets that are currently maintained in a digital format.  Records kept in field notebooks must be converted to an electronic medium before they can be incorporated into the AKN. The maximum number of fields available for an AKN record is 111, or essentially the full Bird Monitoring Data Exchange. Read more about this format here.

What data are not appropriate?

The following data sets are not well suited for the AKN:

1) Data involving taxa other than birds (however, if a dataset contains a mixture of bird and mammal data, the AKN would still be interested in the bird data).

2) Data involving bird specimen records. These data are better directed towards ORNIS and GBIF, both of which specifically collect specimen data in the Darwin Core (DwC) format.

3) Datasets involving dead birds. Surveys of dead birds (e.g., beach surveys of dead birds) are not appropriate for the AKN at this point.

4) Data that are not in digitized format (e.g., in field notebooks).

What data format is ideal for submission?

If you have a data set that you would like to have brought into the AKN and are willing to help format the data in an easily imported format, there are a few things that can be done to streamline the process.

First and foremost, it is preferable that data be well assimilated before being brought into the AKN. It is typically easier to bring in a single large dataset rather than trying to merge multiple pages.

The closer a data set is to the BMDE format, it will be to bring into the AKN. The entire schema can be downloaded here, or the definitions of the variables can be seen here. We can also provide guidance and assistance with federating your data to an AKN format.

Data that are in Access or Excel compatible format are easiest for us to federate. (Note that the Office 2007 version of Excel allows up to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns!) If your data are in other formats we are still interested in trying to bring them in as well.

Click here for more information on how to contribute to the AKN or please contact us directly:

• Western North America--Brian Sullivan (bls42@cornell.edu)
  
• Midwest & Latin America--Chris Wood (clw37@cornell.edu)
• Eastern North America--Marshall Iliff (mji26@cornell.edu)
• Technical Questions--Kevin Webb (kfw4@cornell.edu)