Archiving historic bird checklists from Southwest Alaska’s national parks into eBird and Avian Knowledge Network databases

Gotthardt, Tracey; Walton, Kelly; Stein, Jennifer

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. As part of a previous NPS project, the Alaska Natural Heritage Program (AKNHP) visited each of Alaska’s park offices to gather records of historical bird observations for the NPS Avian Influenza (AI) database. A large amount of this information was unsuitable to be entered into the AI database and is currently housed at AKNHP. These data are primarily comprised of bird checklists from established fieldcamps, ranger trip logs, and visitor observation cards that contain a wealth of information on species presence and relative distribution. Further, these bird observations only exist as hardcopies in files so they are at risk of being discarded and lost if not properly archived. 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. The total number of observations entered for each park was highly variable: Lake Clark National Park and Preserve had the largest number of new records entered (4,366 records in and adjacent to) and Alagnak Wild River (78 records in and adjacent to) had the least. 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. A user manual was developed to provide step by step instructions on how to enter bird observations into eBird to facilitate NPS employees in entering their own observations in the future.

Archiving historic bird checklists from Southwest Alaska’s national parks into eBird and Avian Knowledge Network databases

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