‘If you take care of the birds, you take care of most of the big problems in the world.’ – Thomas E. Lovejoy, “The Godfather of Biodiversity”
2018 is the hundredth anniversary of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Migratory_Bird_Treaty_Act_of_1918), the most powerful and important bird-protection law ever passed. In honor of this milestone, nature lovers around the world are joining forces to celebrate the “Year of the Bird” and commit to protecting birds today and for the next hundred years. Let us help build a better world for birds by taking a simple but meaningful action each month.
We can work together with organizations like GBIF, IUCN, International Ornithologists’ Union, National Geographic, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, BirdLife International, National Audubon Society, Indian Birds, Bird Count India, … They all work together with this common goal.
Let us break the barriers of borders just like these migratory birds. Many of them breed in very remote locations of the world and flies miles and miles to visit of beautiful land. This process repeats in every year. So we need an international database to study more about them; that’s why we create a bird atlas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_atlas). A bird atlas is an ornithological work that attempts to provide information on the distribution, abundance, long-term change as well as seasonal patterns of birdoccurrence and make extensive use of maps. They often involve a large numbers of volunteers to cover a wide geographic area and the methods used are standardized so that the studies can be continued in the future and the results remain comparable.
This purpose requires a uniformed format and international access. It will not work if we collect our data in our own style and kept in local shelves.
Image: Andreas Weith, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/…/File:Kittywakes_at_Fjortend…)