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Breeding and Wintering Birds

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.


Introduction

British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) "encourages the use of its data". Check out what data are available.

Their publication Breeding and wintering bird distributions in Britain and Ireland is accompanied by a freely-available dataset.

Quotes from the abstract:

We undertook large citizen science surveys of bird distributions (atlases) in Britain and Ireland, aimed at quantifying breeding bird distributions on a 20-year cycle and wintering bird distributions on a c. 30-year cycle. We use these to generate spatially referenced information on apparent changes in bird distributions over c. 40 years.

Detection of breeding and wintering bird species in grid squares during five periods, and changes in detection between periods. The combined distribution dataset contains 1,410,938 records detailing detections of 465 bird species in 3,880 grid cells in different periods. The combined distribution change dataset contains 1,297,791 records describing stability, apparent colonization or apparent extinction of individual species in grid squares between pairs of atlases spanning up to c. 40 years.

Grid squares (10 km × 10 km) containing land throughout Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The majority of data are at 10-km resolution, but data for rare species are summarized at 20- or 50-km resolution to protect sensitive locations.

The data represent summarized detection information derived from fieldwork during five periods: the breeding seasons 1968–1972, 1988–1991 and 2008–2011, and the winters 1981/1982–1983/1984 and 2007/2008–2010/2011.


OpenLayers

For the purposes of this app, which is a proof-of-concept, I only include 10km² data and protected species.

The app URL is https://liveservices.info/live/BreedingWinteringBirds

Not all of the 59 protected species are included in the BTO data. Those that are have a BTO species code. In the results 'B' stands for Breeding and 'W' for Wintering.


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