Ohio eBird update: Checklist submissions and the future of Ohio eBird review. There is a recent article posted to the eBird home page concerning the contributions of eBird and includes an estimate that this fall the program will reach 200 million records. I have included a graphic they provide of the growth in checklist submissions and a link to the article which I recommend. This spurred me to take an inventory of Ohios effort which I estimate will hit 2 million records before the year is out. Complete lists vs Incidental. There is no easy means of getting at how many checklists or records involve Ohio eBird. My estimate for records comes after obtaining a specific figure in Feb 2013 directly from Cornell. But I have been tracking the monthly checklist submissions on the homepage for some time (total submissions including INCOMPLETE), while a look at the sample size given at the bottom of the frequency chart for a given species provides a tally of the COMPLETE lists. The difference then should approximate the number of INCIDENTAL entries. Here are the complete checklists as of the end of August 2014 for Ohio eBird. 1900-1979 = 4780 1980-1989 = 4868 1990-1999 = 8514 2000-2009 = 63905 2010-2014 = 179416 as you can see Ohio follows the graphic trend for eBird as a whole. Here is an approximation of total submissions by year since I began keeping track in 2007. 2007 - 13,000 2008 - 18,000 2009 - 23,000 2010 - 31,000 2011 - 42,000 2012 - 54,000 2013 - 68,000 2014 - 61,000 thus far, projecting 96,000 Complete submissions number ~262,000 vs ~313,000 total. If I estimate about 20,000 entries prior to 2007, this suggests about 55,000 incidental records. These are just ballpark figures but I think give a fair sense of the effort in Ohio. Bottomline, the number of submissions is getting unwieldy for a single reviewer. In April, for example, I reached 300 pieces of email correspondence for a single month. This is unsustainable. In the near term, I intend to contact up to 6 individuals to form a review panel. Already, a dozen individuals across the state take a hard look at their respective regions and report regularly on suspect checklists. And of course, any member of the birding community may do so. I hear from perhaps another dozen eBirders in any given year, and encourage this feedback. The immediate purpose of the panel will be to aid in the disposition of submissions. The ultimate goal of this immersive experience is the delegation of regional reviewers. I dont have a set time frame, just a sense that this will be a necessity by late next year. This is admittedly a cautious approach. Other states already engage dozens of reviewers with mixed results. It is not enough to simply review submissions for ID errors. While seemingly on the rise, they remain a small proportion of the infractions that are dominated by mapping errors, protocol errors, and typos. While I have found some folks inclined to address ID matters, the tedium of the latter issues is what I need to know a would-be reviewer can cope with, and do so in the form of patient communication with what amounts to the client, your fellow birder. See ... ebird.org/content/ebird/news/gbif/
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 14:21:47 +0000
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