U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Division of  Bird Habitat Conservation and Division of  Migratory Bird Management,
U.S. Geological Survey,  Patuxent Wildlife Research Center

Background

VISION

The success of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI) and its constituent bird conservation plans in conserving North America’s avian diversity requires the application of sound science to meet emerging conservation challenges.  Development of the scientific framework for managing bird populations has been made more difficult because of outdated data management strategies and the distributed nature of important databases.   To begin to address this problem, the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) collaborated in establishng the Bird Conservation Node as part of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). The Bird Conservation Node provides access to bird population and habitat information relevent to population management, conservation planning, and evaluation. In order to make important agency databases available through the Bird Conservation Node, the FWS and USGS formed this Migratory Bird Data Center.  Building upon complementary capabilities of the FWS and the USGS, the objectives of this Center are to: (1) assemble and document bird population and habitat data maintained by these agencies at their finest levels of spatial and temporal resolution; (2) assure that databases remain current through periodic update; and (3) provide web-based access to the data by researchers and managers for strategic planning and evaluation of avian conservation strategies.

STATUS

The Migratory Bird Data Center came online in the spring of 2002 through the collaborative efforts of the FWS’s Divisions of Bird Habitat Conservation and Migratory Bird Management, and the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and Center for Biological Informatics.  To demonstrate the utility of the Data Center, visualization and query capabilities have been developed for four important bird population databases. Link to the online interactive mapping application. As resources permit, access to additional population and habitat databases will be offered.