2017 marks the fourth official year of the Oregon2020 project. As we continue to pursue our goal of a statewide benchmark of Oregon’s bird populations, we’re excited to present two new pages demonstrating our progress so far.
Statewide Hotspot Square Coverage
As part of our County Explorer Project, we established Hotspot Squares to provide more evenly distributed coverage of statewide bird data, and encourage participants to count birds in new areas. We ask all participants to enter their Hotspot bird data into eBird.org. This makes the count data available to researchers like ourselves as well as other birders.
After the last eBird database update (April 2016), we downloaded all publicly available bird survey data from Oregon2020 Hotspot Squares. You’ll see the results below, with full discussion on the new Project Status page.
Orange dots represent Oregon2020 Hotspot Squares. The size of the dot indicates the amount of birding effort within the square. Counties are colored by percentage of Hotspots surveyed.
As you can see, we’ve come a long way towards increasing the coverage of bird data in Oregon. But we still have a lot of work ahead! In the upcoming seasons, we’ll focus our efforts on the comparatively less-surveyed (white or light gray) counties, where fewer Hotspots have been visited.
Curious to know how many bird species we’ve found within Hotspots in each county? Check out the Project Status page for that information as well.
Hotspot Challenge Standings
As part of the County Explorer project, we challenged birders to visit as many Hotspot Squares as they could, and submit as many stationary eBird checklists possible. Your effort so far is impressive! On the new Hotspot Challenge Standings page, you can see where you stand among other eBirders in terms of Oregon2020 Hotspot effort, both within each county and statewide.
We look forward to offering prizes and incentives to Hotspot Challenge participants with high rankings or who have otherwise made large contributions of data to our project. Want a chance to win? Find out more about participating in our Hotspot Challenge!
A note on the data: All data used to create these project status updates was downloaded from the publicly available eBird database. eBird updates this database periodically throughout the year, and our download does not contain most recently submitted checklists. Therefore, current standings and Hotspot coverage are likely to be somewhat different. We will continue to update both the Project Status and Hotspot Standings pages with new information as it becomes available through eBird. Don’t want your name to appear on our standings? Let us know!