What You Need to Know About the Migratory Bird Initiative

The Migratory Bird Initiative (MBI) was created with one mission: to secure the future of migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere using the power of migration science. As one critical component of this work, the Migratory Bird Initiative is helping to gather the latest information on where hundreds of bird species go to breed and winter in the Americas throughout their annual cycles as well as their migratory routes between these places. Namely, the three key types of migration data are: occurrence and abundance data from models of eBird data (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), banding encounter data (courtesy of the USGS Bird Banding Lab), and tracking data such as geolocators and satellite transmitters (from numerous sources primarily hosted on Movebank). 

Realizing what it would mean for bird conservation to connect these three types of data in a bigger, unified picture, Audubon brought together a team of scientists, biologists, GIS/data analysts, and communicators. The initiative integrates these data to better understand birds’ annual cycles, connections, and threats. Identifying threats allows Audubon and partners to protect the hundreds of species of migratory birds soaring across the Western Hemisphere. 

Mikko Jimenez and Chad Witko are the MBI team’s ambassadors. As outreach biologists on the team, they spend their days reaching out to scientific institutions, researchers, and other nonprofit organizations to explain the initiative, answer their questions, and ask stakeholders to contribute tracking data to the Migratory Bird Initiative. Below, Jimenez and Witko answer commonly asked questions about the Migratory Bird Initiative. 

The purpose for assembling the data is twofold. The first purpose is public engagement and education around the joy of migration and threats to migratory birds. The Migratory Bird Initiative is using contributed data to develop an online Migratory Bird Conservation Platform to highlight migration patterns for 550 North American species, as well maps that show how birds connect people across the hemisphere and the threats they face. Most importantly, it will show how you can take action to protect them and the areas they need most. With animated full annual cycle maps and exploratory tools to look at where your birds go, the experience will be like none other.

Second, we are interested in using the data to identify the most important places for migratory birds, to better understand how birds are threatened in these places and what we can do to protect them.  We’re excited to work with other researchers on focused projects across the hemisphere that will help Audubon and other organizations protect migratory birds. We will appropriately cite all the data we use per the data-holder’s preference.

Keeping this much data organized is a huge task. To accomplish this, we have partnered with Movebank, a free online platform that helps researchers manage, share, analyze and archive animal movement data. We ask that researchers post their data on Movebank and then share it with us through the site. Each researcher retains ownership of their data and can control with whom they share it. 

As outreach biologists, one of our jobs is to understand any concerns researchers have about sharing their data.

Many data-holders have devoted their life’s work to their research, investing time and effort to gather that data and to secure the funding that made their research possible. Occasionally researchers are concerned that their shared data will be used by others before they have a chance to publish it themselves, in which case we keep in touch with them and follow up once their publication is complete. Other times, published researchers are concerned about data being used for additional studies without their guidance or acknowledgment.  When this arises, we have one-on-one conversations with researchers or research teams to build a shared understanding of MBI and explain our process for inviting data-holders to collaborate on publishable studies that rely on their data and crediting their work in our digital products.  

In the end, we hope that sharing data helps researchers further disseminate their work, demonstrates the importance of their data, and earns the benefits of participation in MBI through contributing to hemispheric conservation efforts for migratory birds.