|
What is BirdTrack? BirdTrack is an online bird recording scheme developed through an exciting partnership between BTO, RSPB and BirdWatch Ireland. It is a year–round recording scheme that will use data from birdwatchers records to support species and site conservation at local, national and international scales. Results produced by BirdTrack will include mapping the migration and movements of birds and monitoring of scarce birds in Britain and Ireland. BirdTrack follows on from the successful Migration Watch project that looked at spring migration in 2002-2004. We know very little about the timing of arrival and departure of winter visitors and this is just one area in which BirdTrack will provide useful information. There are also many scarce birds where we would like to know much more about their populations. The development of BirdTrack is an on-going process and new features will be added to the website over the next two years. We intend to provide a comprehensive bird recording scheme that birdwatchers can use to store all of their birdwatching records. We will be working closely with county bird recorders to ensure that your records are also available for use at a local level. With your permission, all of your records will automatically be forwarded to the relevant county recorder. The idea behind BirdTrack is simple and follows the concept of the successful Migration Watch project which was based on gathering large numbers of lists of birds.
The local and national results are available on the website for everyone to look at - you don’t have to be a BirdTrack recorder. Every night the BirdTrack computer at BTO HQ will look at all the records submitted that day by observers across the country and will produce up-to-date maps and graphs showing the latest in migration, movements abd distribution. The species featured will vary depending on the time of year and will remain topical. There are animated maps showing the arrival and departure of migrants and the seasonal movements of birds. For scarce species, such as Hawfinch, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, Woodcock and Water Rail we will be building up a picture of their distribution throughout the year. You can also view your own records through specially designed features. We hope that birdwatchers of all abilities will take part in BirdTrack. By encouraging large numbers of volunteers to join in the project we will be able to gather a large amount of unique and fascinating information. Recording migration patterns Migration Watch was able to record the timing of arrivals and pattern of migratory spread of summer visitors across Britain & Ireland. This was a huge achievement and the power of the Internet made it possible to produce up-to-date daily results. What we hope to do through BirdTrack is to create an all-year round recording package so that we can also study autumn migration (a much biggger challenge) and other movements and distributions. As with Migration Watch we are interested in not just when the first birds arrive or the last ones depart but we also want to know when the bulk of the population has arrived or departed (whether it is summer or winter visitors). We will also be able to get some really interesting information on passage migrants, particualarly inland wader movements. We can work this out by looking at the proportion of volunteers that have recorded a particular species on a given day. By using the lists and counts of species submitted by volunteers we can also investigate how birds filter through the country; do they head up the centre of the country or do they disperse west or east in spring time? Tracking the conservation status of scarce species An important aspect of BirdTrack is to provide supplementary information on some of the scarcer species in Britain and Ireland. Many species are monitored well by existing surveys such as the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey and by periodical surveys like Seabird 2000 and the recent Nightjar survey. Others are difficult to survey well due to the habitats they occupy, their low breeding density and their secretive nature! There is a range of species for which birdwatchers could easily and usefully contribute information. We hope to build up an annual picture of their distribution in Britain and Ireland, which would provide an excellent source of information between national Atlas projects. For species like Hawfinch, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker and Woodcock we would like to receive records from throughout the year but for others we are more interested in records from the breeding season, for example Pochard and Dunlin. |
%20(A).jpg)
|
|
 |
|
BirdTrack is organised
by the BTO for the BTO, RSPB and BWI |
|