Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has engaged the public in citizen science since the 1960’s and has led the wave of efforts to create projects to engage the public in monitoring biodiversity.  This has led to innovation in development of web applications to collect, map, share, and display bird data online.  We now have a suite of projects generating important information on bird distributions and abundance at massive scales. This talk focuses on increasingly sophisticated approaches to understanding impacts of environmental change on birds and the combination of citizen science with the fruits of social science research to help create projects that engage the public to become more intimately engaged in the solutions to conservation problems. The first example highlights new approaches to analyzing changes in the distribution and abundance of birds as a dynamic process, using data collected across seasons and years.  These approaches lead to increasingly realistic and profound insights into the impacts of environmental change on bird populations at all times of year. The second example focuses on efforts to combine the mapping of residential habitats and domestic practices with social networking to study both urban-exurban ecology and human behavior.  Together, these examples demonstrate the capacity of citizen science both to track and predict changes in bird populations and to support large and active online communities focused on the issues of biodiversity and climate change.