Project Goals and Objectives:
1) increase the utility of the International Shorebird Survey (ISS) for making shorebird management and conservation decisions within the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and
2) create a single data management system that can service all partners along the Atlantic coast
Project Summary:
The utility of the International Shorebird Survey (ISS) has been greatly improved with an upgraded, user-friendly interface for data entry and retrieval. Manomet and ISS have contributed to the increasingly powerful citizen science bird records mechanism in eBird. Historic ISS data collected largely by volunteers as well as professional federal and state biologists over the last 40 years has been error checked and uploaded electronically to the Avian Knowledge Network (AKN), adding valuable long-term records of local shorebird abundance and phenology. Now shorebird survey results can be entered directly by individual surveyors using a newly created ISS portal in Cornell’s eBird system. Data entry is possible with bulk uploading for multiple surveys on a large landscape such a National Wildlife Refuge, as well as the more standard individual survey directly into eBird.
A no-cost extension allowed Manomet staff the ability to locate all foreign hardcopy ISS submissions, format them to allow bulk downloading, and add them through the ISS-eBird portal to the Avian Knowledge Network database.
A secondary yet related pilot project involving more rigorous survey parameters for ISS is underway on the Atlantic Coast. This project is being coordinated by Jon Bart of the US Geological Survey and fostered and promoted at the state implementation level by Manomet staff at five regional meetings from Georgia to Maine. This methodology takes the basic ISS approach but adds a more rigorous sampling frame in order to make more robust population level inferences.
