For a group of animals we see every day, birds still hide a lot of secrets. Which ones are disappearing fastest? How many live high in the mountains? Which ones build their nests in tree holes?
Now, after 26 years, a huge project has pulled the answers to all these questions – and a lot more – into one massive dataset called BIRDBASE.
The dataset just became publicly available to scientists everywhere. With data on nearly 11,600 bird species from across the globe, this project didn’t start with a big plan. It started with a question.
Back in 1999, a grad student had a simple goal. He wanted to figure out how many species of tropical birds that live near the forest floor and eat insects were threatened with extinction. That number didn’t exist. No one had ever done a worldwide analysis of birds based on their diet and conservation status.
He found that “this statistic doesn’t exist because nobody had analyzed all the birds of the world and their threat status based on diet.” So, he decided to build the database himself.
That student was Çağan Şekercioğlu, who’s now a conservation biologist at the University of Utah. What started as one question has turned into a life’s work.
The dataset includes 78 traits for each of 11,589 species, across 254 bird families. These traits range from body mass and habitat to diet, nest type, clutch size, movement strategy, and elevation range. It even includes their conservation status, which tells us how threatened a species is.
While a few rare species still have some missing data, the bird database is the most complete collection of bird life-history traits ever assembled. And now the dataset is out in the open – free to use, no strings attached.
Scientists can use it to look for patterns: why some birds are more at risk than others, how different behaviors affect survival, and how birds are reacting to climate change and habitat loss.
It took a couple of years, but Şekercioğlu finally got the answer to his original question. “Twenty-seven percent of tropical understory insectivores were threatened or near threatened with extinction.”
That stat didn’t even support the original theory behind his PhD, but it didn’t matter. The work had real value, and the data became useful to researchers studying birds from all over the world.
Even before its official release, BIRDBASE has been used in dozens of scientific studies, helping scientists write papers and discover new insights.
In fact, 98 of Şekercioğlu’s own scientific papers have used this database, and these papers have been cited more than 14,000 times in other researchers’ work.
One major finding from BIRDBASE is that 54% of the world’s bird species are insectivores, and many of them are in trouble. “Most of them are tropical forest species. It is a very important group and they’re declining. They’re sensitive even though they’re not hunted,” Şekercioğlu said.
Another discovery is that seabirds that eat fish are also at high risk of extinction. Meanwhile, fruit-eating birds play a major role in tropical forests.
“The most important seed dispersers in the tropics are frugivorous birds,” he explained. “In some tropical forests, over 90% of all woody plants’ seeds are dispersed by fruit-eating birds who eat them and then defecate the seeds somewhere else and they germinate.”
These details might seem small, but they’re essential for protecting ecosystems and planning conservation efforts. If the birds disappear, so does their role in the environment.
BIRDBASE wasn’t built overnight. It took nearly 30 person-years of work. That includes time in the field watching birds, and time at the computer entering data from books, research papers, and databases like BirdLife International and Birds of the World.
Thousands of hours went into organizing information into spreadsheet tabs with everything from nest details to trait definitions. The result: one downloadable Excel file with a row for every bird species.
Şekercioğlu compares it to an old cathedral – always in use, never quite finished. “Thanks to my being naïve, something that started with just a little question in grad school led to the foundation of my career,” he said.
“Right now, if one of my students came to me and said, ‘Hey, as part of my Ph.D. I want to enter the world’s birds into a dataset,’ I’m like, ‘No, you’re not doing that. You’ll never finish your Ph.D.’”
Even with all this new bird data, we still have things to do. Şekercioğlu points out that “birds are the best-known class of organism, but even though they are the best known, we still have big data gaps.”
BIRDBASE gives scientists a tool to ask bigger questions, find more accurate answers, and push for better conservation policies. It also shows how much is still unknown, even about the creatures flying above our heads.
This project may have started with one person and a question, but now it belongs to everyone.
The full study was published in the journal Scientific Data.
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