Hopefully on line data bases of bird sightings will continue to grow and
evolve along the lines suggested by Dave Torr so that they become
increasingly more useful to amateur and professional birders,
ornithologists,and ecologists.
Despite the plethora of interesting sightings on birding-aus, the fact
remains that there are still too few observers spread too unevenly over
our vast country.
More people need to be encouraged to become more aware of wild birds to
the point that they feel confident enough to start contributing to at
least one of the many existing data bases.
Our national birding organizations are well placed to assist in
expanding community awareness and knowledge of wild birds but need more
members to remain viable.
If your membership has lapsed - where the bloody hell are you?
Cheers,
Peter
Dave Torr wrote:
It is certainly good that an increasing number of Aussie birders are
using databases to record their sightings - whether private or public,
web based or PC based, free or subscription.
However, it concerns me that there are so many systems available -
BA'a Atlas, Birdpedia, OZBirds, Eremaea that I know of online, and a
number of commercial packages on PCs as well as people's own software.
In the interests of the Aussie birding community - and particularly
for long term research and monitoring - it seems to me that the data
is far too scattered, and that it is currently too hard to get a
comprehensive picture of bird observations.
Whilst I appreciate that all systems have their pros and cons, I feel
it would be of great benefit if the providers of the various online
databases could come up with some technique for sharing data, so that
people do not have to subscribe to multiple services in order to know
what is being seen
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