Relative to the discussion of hotspots, there are two recent improvements that should be mentioned:
1 the app for entry now is using the phone's GPS function to record a track of where the birding really was done.
2 some areas have had their outline recorded into the ebird system, meaning that a track falling into that area automatically can by output as a part of that location. It is my impression that eventually, this will spread to more and more locations
these two improvements when fully implemented will do away with the need for choosing a hotspot except for data entered on a device after the fact.
Niels
That's what I would suggest as well, and I am quite happy it's going this way.
It really doesn't take any effort with an app on your phone to enter every sighting and get the correct GPS for that sighting included in the observation.
Any good software can pick out all sightings within a certain range or with map overlays within a certain habitat. I feel hotspots were initially aimed for what Niels said (compiling complete checklists), but there is really no reason to allow, nowadays, that input data are already lumped before actually putting them into the database.
You actually allow the observer to make mistakes / lump data / omit accuracy and specific info per species / observation, without any good reason. If ebird would aknowledge that, the database could be solely fed, starting from tomorrow, with clean app data that are GPS-logged observations. Those observations could be finallyuseful to filter individual species + location, and also still useful to make bar charts of hotspots, by simply including all observations within a (pre-defined) GIS polygon that determines a hotspot for those that still want to extract those data.
I can name 100ths of examples of wrong hotspots or birds of lower altitude lumped in a hotspot at higher altitude that was coincidentally visited the same day... just look at a map (I am preparing an India trip) of Indian Spotted Creeper in Tal Chhappar. Some sightings are included in the hotspot "Tal Chhapar sanctuary". The location of that hotspot is in the middle of the Blackbuck sanctuary. It turns out hardly anyone sees this bird in the sanctuary, so any sightings in that hotspot are absolutely worthless to find the bird. Another hotspot "Tal Chhapar WLS -- Gaushala area" is a bit closer to the sightings, but still, you can't really conclude anything else than some people have seen the bird in the general area of Tal Chhappar. I agree double hotspots are technically not there, but people don't use the nuance of a very near hotspot and most put everything in one hotspot, whether another hotspot is actually closer to their sightings or not.
Those kind of lumping of data should just not happen. The observers have the tools (smartphones with GPS) to give far more accuracy and information, so just skip the hotspot part and let people fill in the same list of 50-100 species per day with spatial data instead of lumped data.
The only reason I can think of why ebird is still using hotspots, is because data visualisation in their maps is probably quicker to render. But that quick solution is in the long term not the best solution, and rendering data goes a lot quicker these days than e.g. 5 years ago.