Archiving Historic Bird Checklists from Southwest Alaska’s National Parks into eBird and AKN databases

Major funding from: NPS, Southwest Alaska Network

The Southwest Alaska Network (SWAN) of the National Park Service (NPS) is assessing status and monitoring long-term trends of key natural resources or “vital signs” in its five national park units, including Alagnak Wild River, Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Kenai Fjords National Park, and Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. When available, historical data can provide valuable insight into past conditions as well as an important context for future monitoring.

eBird and the Avian Knowledge Network (AKN) are two databases used by professional and amateur birders for recording bird data across the western hemisphere and provide rich sources of information about the distribution and relative abundance of birds.

The goals of this project were to 1) compile historic bird records from SWAN parks, 2) enter these records into an archival database (eBird or AKN) where they can be accessed by researchers and the general public, and 3) develop a standard operating procedure for NPS staff to enter bird observations into eBird.

We summarized 8,704 incidental observations for 183 bird species from 82 unique data sources and entered this information into the AKN and eBird databases. Observations spanned the time period from 1919 to 2004. Of the 8,704 records, 69% were entered into AKN and 31% were uploaded into eBird.