BACKGROUND
Purpose and Development of the Bird Conservation Node
Public interest in birds is at an all-time high as a result of the recreational value and their importance as indicators of the health of the environment. Continued concern over habitat degradation and declining populations of some species of birds in North America have driven the development of several national and international bird conservation initiatives. The North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI), formed to coordinate conservation activities across taxonomic groups. The success of NABCI and its constituent bird conservation plans in conserving North America's avian diversity depends on the application of sound science to meet emerging conservation challenges. Planning and evaluation of science-based bird conservation strategies require an understanding of how bird populations respond to habitats at local, regional and continental scales. A challenge in developing these integrated conservation strategies is assembling, documenting, cataloging, and assuring rapid access to bird data and information. Although a tremendous volume of baseline data exists, it is often dispersed and inaccessible for use in the development of bird conservation strategies.
In an effort to increase the accessibility of bird data and information useful in planning and evaluation of bird conservation strategies as well as in natural resource management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, and USGS Center for Biological Informatics are working together under the umbrella of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) to establish and implement the NBII Bird Conservation Node. This node is intended to facilitate rapid access to North American bird population and habitat data maintained by a broad coalition of Federal, state, and non-governmental partners in conservation.
The NBII Bird Conservation Node, which came online in the fall of 2001, focuses on providing electronic access to some of the major bird monitoring and habitat databases held in North America. The node will initially emphasize delivery of raw and derived bird population data held by the USGS and USFWS Migratory Bird Data Center. But as the node grows, it will link to North American bird data sets and information maintained and managed by other partners.
This NBII site is developed and maintained by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
and the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.
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