How reliable is E-bird? (1 Viewer)

jurek said:

Well, how would you treat a person who has problems with keeping records and sometimes says he has seen shorebirds in a rainforest?

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Which of course isn't the case here and as a statement is more erroneous than the checklist.......

Of course, if it causes an issue then the checklist can be excluded and the observer will receive a notification that has been done. That has occurred to me before when for instance, I have input a single checklist rather than multiple ones whilst birding around south mainland in Shetland. The records are in there and someone may find them useful. If I was relying on an individual sighting, I would ordinarily go to the checklist and any supporting evidence in any event. Excluding the content seems a shame to me.

The wording used is as follows:-

CHECKLIST FLAGGED
Distance too long. This checklist has been flagged for covering a large distance. Specific locations and shorter distances are required for public display: this checklist and its observations do not appear in public eBird outputs.

https://ebird.org/checklist/S53079982

Personally, I would have thought that others might have found the checklist useful but I understand both sides of the argument.

All the best

folks reading this thread should be aware of one other thing --

there are several types of checklists in eBird, including "Stationary", "Traveling" (you input a distance covered), "Area" (you input an area covered), "Historical", and "Incidental".

many of the "bad record" checklists in eBird are either marked as "Incidental" or "Historical" or cover a very large area, e.g. "Traveling" but with a distance covered of 10 miles or more. These are useful when you do not have effort information, e.g. when I have a list of species I saw at a site over two months when I did not keep daily lists.

Scientific research that uses eBird records typically wants to tie a record to a location. In which case it is very easy to simply not include checklists in the analysis that are "Incidental", "Historical", "Traveling" (where distance is more than a couple miles), "Area" (where area is more than some cut-off) etc. So while single hotspots almost invariably have inflated species totals because they include such checklists, these do not skew analyses that use eBird data.

This also means that scientific analyses are not messed up if you use "Incidental" or "Historical" checklists to add species you have seen in a certain region for listing purposes.

This is an interesting thread. As a relatively new birder I have used Ebird from the start and I have found that here in California it is a really valuable resource for me personally, on a recent trip to Portugal, not so much.

On the other hand, I bird the same area 5 days a week and it still shows some birds as unreported even though I see them almost daily. This is due to the moderator I am sure.

Now as a tool for scientific research I am sure that it is helpful, but due to the variability of accuracy of amateur birders, I'm sure that it has it's drawbacks.

Now this may be because European birders use platforms based on ornitho or observado. Unfortunately cannot help you which is the one of choice in Portugal.

Jurek,
Yes I agree. Luckily, we had guides outside of Lisbon and Porto.

Hi Jurek,

jurek said:

Now this may be because European birders use platforms based on ornitho or observado. Unfortunately cannot help you which is the one of choice in Portugal.

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Could you please post a link to observado? My preferred search engine doesn't seem to find it, or only this one:

https://www.observation.org

Probably it's the same, as it has a redirection from observado.org, but I am still sort of confused.

Many thanks!

Henning

As a moderator for eBird in Tanzania I can say that a major issue here is the reliance on guides - both human and ageing books/apps. In both cases misidentification is common and taxonomy is out of date. When people are entering sightings they often can't find a match for the name supplied by the guide so wither guess or choose a name that is close (for a species only found in Australia/Sri Lanka/China etc). Accuracy of locations is also an issue - long drives between beds in the Serengeti get lumped into one point with 5 decimal point accuracy lats and longs. We are getting tougher on these lists and are now tending to remove them from public view.

Hauksen said:

Could you please post a link to observado? My preferred search engine doesn't seem to find it, or only this one:

https://www.observation.org

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That's it. :t: I hope some BF member from Portugal can comment how the Portuguese birders prefer to exchange sightings online.

jurek said:

That's it. :t: I hope some BF member from Portugal can comment how the Portuguese birders prefer to exchange sightings online.

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I've worked with quite a few Portuguese birders and they are all keen eBirders and most were reviewers for ebird.

RyanI said:

I've worked with quite a few Portuguese birders and they are all keen eBirders and most were reviewers for ebird.

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Yep.

4000 birders have contributed to eBird in Portugal.

DMW said:

There are two issues at play. The first is simple identification error, which is very frequent. The second is the use of hotspots, which are the easy option when inputting records. This is usually why you get records of waders in rainforest, or shy forest species in the middle of cities.

Sadly, some birders seem to use ebird as their personal listing software, and just dump records, often with an x rather than an actual count, in random locations in a country, often the capital city. Personally I would like to see ebird close the accounts of birders who do this.

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I noticed this when some Dutch birders were doing a Western Palearctic 'big year'. All sorts of sightings suddenly appeared in Surrey, which were clearly erroneous. I imagine that the people in question just chose a random spot on the map of England and submitted a list of everything they had seen. Sooner or later the reviewers will catch up with them. I had a sighting of a tawny eagle in India in 1987 queried recently! I had to admit that it was not proven.