Observations contributed by birders and professionals through a variety of projects, bird counts, banding, and other surveys are being pooled in one massive database called the Avian Knowledge Network. AKN (http://www.avianknowledge.net) is the brainchild of statisticians, computer scientists, and ornithologists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics at Cornell University.

Yet it’s not what AKN is doing, but how it’s being done that has attracted a new grant from the Leon Levy Foundation. “What interested them is the cross-disciplinary approach that we’re taking to try to answer large-scale questions about bird populations, demographics, and conservation,” says Lab Information Science director Steve Kelling.

“We integrate birds, statistics, and computer science—we’re actually doing research in statistics and the computer sciences to answer questions about bird biology.”

The Levy Foundation grant will fund the work of Cornell University graduate student Daria Sorokina. She developed a new technique for creating more accurate computer models using AKN data. These models help scientists understand the complicated relationship between birds and thousands of features in the environment the affect them, such as trees, water, predators, and food. By combining these variables with massive numbers of bird observations, scientists see large scale patterns that could not be found otherwise. These patterns can then be visualized with maps.

AKN has accumulated 36 million bird data records over the past three years and the avalanche of information continues. Kelling says AKN data are being accessed daily, fueling scientific inquiry into birds across the continent and made possible with observations contributed by bird watchers everywhere.

Contributed by Pat Leonard/CLO