I hope everyone realizes that we try hard at eBird not to be a US-centric website. As a global program, we do the best we can with this and are constantly making improvements to better serve the community of birders worldwide (most recently:
http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/targets/). On the other hand, most of the data we collect are still from the Americas, with the US and Canada collecting the lion’s share of the data. However, we are working hard to enable partners worldwide (in Iceland, the UAE, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan etc.) to take the existing website and use it for data collection in their local areas.
One of the ways we approach this is through regional portals. With a regional portal, local partners control the home page content, can set the data exploration defaults, local common name preferences can be set, local language settings can be set (in addition to French, Spanish, and Portuguese, eBird is being translated into Turkish and Mandarin). We still have a long way to go to make the site more international, but feel we have made a lot of progress. Simply allowing any character set from any language in the world was a major database upgrade, but one that we now have no problems offering. The regional portals are here (look for two European ones soon!):
http://ebird.org/content/ebird/about/portals/
Worldbirds was a project of BirdLife International which is being discontinued; its databases were not integrated, so each portal effectively collected its own local dataset. Worldbirds partners have been asked to decide between migrating their data to eBird or BirdTrack. At eBird we have already loaded all data for South America and the Caribbean, and those data are all explorable via the eBird output tools at
http://ebird.org/ebird/eBirdReports?cmd=Start.We are working on Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Malaysia and we expect to complete these win the next couple months. I can’t speak to how the BirdTrack process is going since their global version does not yet allow data exploration.
We have a long history of partnership with the BTO and RSPB, and these new partnerships with migration of Worldbirds data are exciting and helping to engage new partners in eBird. We would certainly like to see a world where real-time information on bird occurrence in concentrated in one place, and have been seeking that funding jointly with BTO, but thus far have not been able to fund some of the major operations that would be needed. In the meantime, we encourage birders to test both systems and choose the one that works best for him or her. For those that bird only in the UK, Birdtrack probably works best; if you bird outside Britain, you should certainly consider eBird.
Please do know that there are a variety of local common name options in eBird.
http://help.ebird.org/customer/portal/articles/1596582-common-name-translations-in-ebird
Also, for this group, the issue of using multiple taxonomies is likely to be of interest. eBird will be releasing an IOC name set for later this spring. This will be a 1:1 match on taxonomic concepts, and this process is helping the Clements/eBird and IOC to resolve some of the thornier taxonomic issues.
I know BTO has advertised the ability to choose multiple taxonomies, but the issue of course is not entering using multiple taxonomies but the display of those data back (via personal lists, maps, or other output) as matched taxonomies. This is arcane stuff, but on the database side, it is essential that "White-winged Scoter" in one taxonomy refers to the same creature (and range circumscription) as in another. In other words, if one taxonomy uses White-winged Scoter sensu lato, and another uses it sensu stricto, then major data display problems result.
Geoff, it is great to have you using eBird in Serbia. Feel free to get in touch directly (mji26 AT cornell.edu if you have further questions).
