In preparation for the launch of Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas II, the atlas team has loaded about 166,000 records from the first Wisconsin Breeding Bird Atlas into eBird. While a valuable dataset in itself, these records also will provide helpful comparisons during the second atlas effort. Atlas staff and volunteers will quickly be able to see which species were confirmed in an atlas block last time that haven’t been confirmed yet this time around.
“One cool thing we were able to do was associate these data with your eBird account,” said Nick Anich, the Wisconsin DNR Breeding Bird Atlas coordinator and a leader of the Wisconsin eBird team. “If you participated in the first Atlas, we tried to find your eBird account and import the records directly into it. We managed to successfully tie about 108,000 records to user accounts!”
Anich offers these suggestions:
• If you’d like to review any records that were placed in your account, the easiest way to see a summary of this is probably to go to your Wisconsin Year List on the My eBird tab, and then click the pull-down to change the year to any year you atlased (between 1995 and 2000). This should give you a complete list of the species you had that year. Clicking any species gives you a complete list of occasions you found that species that year. Clicking the date takes you to the checklist, from which you can click through and see where the location falls
• If you find any issues that need correcting, please email atlas@wsobirds.org. We’re trying to ensure the accuracy of this data because it will have a bearing on the WBBA II effort, so we’d appreciate if you can touch base with us before you make any changes.
• You can also find a full list of all your checklists by going to Manage My Observations on the My eBird tab. And you can also use the Species Maps to explore data.
• If for some reason things don’t look as you expect, email us and we’ll get it sorted out. In some cases, a few records may fall into the wrong county, because some atlas blocks straddle county lines but most data was imported to the atlas block center point. For some records there may be a delay before they show up on the map. Anything that got flagged as rare by the checklist filters (morethan 2,500 records) will have to be reviewed manually.
