The goal of Audubon’s Migratory Bird Initiative is to achieve full life cycle conservation for North America’s migratory birds. We will achieve this by engaging people in the joy of migration, identifying the places birds need to thrive and the threats they encounter, and taking actions that protect the places that matter most across the Americas. As part of this work, Audubon is assembling the latest spatial information on species distributions and movements across their annual cycles. We value the investment the research and conservation communities have made in tracking migratory birds, and our intention is to develop products that add value to advance conservation while not duplicating existing and ongoing research efforts. Your contribution of data will help us address hemispheric-scale conservation issues by applying science to engage in public awareness and conservation and policy actions.

Benefits of participation: 

• Your data and expertise will join forces with hundreds of other contributions to enable powerful visualizations and conservation assessments.
• Your work will be credited in our products, and will gain wider recognition through exposure to Audubon’s large and varied audience of bird-watchers, researchers, educators, decision-makers, and funders.
• Participation will promote collaborations among peers by joining a growing network of researchers and conservation practitioners.
• You may leverage your participation and in-kind support for this project in your own funding proposals and on your website.
• There are opportunities for collaboration and shared publications related to Audubon’s mission of bird conservation.
• Storing your data in Movebank has additional benefits beyond those associated with this project. In Movebank your data are safely deposited for long-term archiving, data are easily shared among your collaborators, multiple transmitter platforms are stored in a common format, and environmental data are easily accessed to annotate tracks.

How we will use your datasets:

Mapping and Visualization

We will use the data we compile for mapping and visualization for education and outreach purposes. Such works to be publicly distributed may include: static maps; animated annual cycle visualizations; and interactive data exploration tools that allows users to view, query, and overlay data. Data exploration tools will use a combination of the best-available tracking, banding, and occurrence data and may display summarized species occurrence, abundance, and movement. We will obscure the precise locations of raw data from public view by limiting the viewable scale of data to 1:250,000, and/or by summarizing raw data into 3-km or greater bins. Generalized derived products (but not raw data or individual tracks) may be downloadable.

Conservation Assessment

Our initiative will build upon the best available science and existing analyses to add value for conservation. We will use the data we compile for analyses related to conservation prioritization (e.g. the identification of core areas, stopovers, bottlenecks), landscape threats, and/or management solutions throughout the Western Hemisphere. Importantly, these efforts will typically assess multiple data sources and/or multiple species so that your data will contribute to and leverage from a much larger migration dataset. Works to be publicly distributed online or in print include static maps and results of analyses, which may be published in reports, peer-reviewed journals, interactive maps, decision support tools, or as downloadable datasets. Acknowledgment of data contributions and/or coauthorship will be given where appropriate (see below).

Sharing and Limitations

Audubon’s work of mapping and visualization, spatial analysis, modeling, prioritization, and/or assessment, will be in service to Audubon’s mission to conserve birds and their habitat.

Raw data will be shared among members of a science team of Audubon staff and, as deemed necessary, may be shared with Audubon subcontractors and collaborating research associates solely for purposes of working on the Migratory Bird Initiative, all under the direction of Audubon. Subcontractors and research associates will be contractually limited to use the data for specified purposes only as the work relates to Audubon’s mission, will sign a confidentiality agreement, and will dispose of data when research is complete. Except as described here, raw original source data will not be shared outside Audubon.

Audubon may map and analyze the data using a variety of digital technologies (e.g., Esri software, R). We may make publicly viewable and downloadable maps, visuals, reports, and peer-reviewed publications available through Audubon’s digital media, including Audubon’s website. Additionally, we may provide publicly downloadable datasets according to the limitations described above (e.g., derived products such as summarized spatial data and results of analyses and models).

For Audubon reports, visualizations, and websites, data contributions will be acknowledged and authorship will be limited to Audubon staff and contractors. For publications in peer-reviewed journals, the primary researcher(s) and/or institution(s) responsible for the data will be invited to participate as authors if they meet the following authorship guidelines used by the Royal Society:

• Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
• Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
• Final approval of the version to be published; and
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Audubon will credit you in connection with your data wherever practicable, and will direct outside requests for raw data to you, your institution, and/or your study’s page on Movebank where visibility and access is restricted per your existing permissions settings and license terms.

You understand and agree that you have our permission to use Audubon’s name in your materials and on your website to publicize your participation in this project (e.g., contributing to the Audubon Migratory Bird Initiative), but without a written license from Audubon, you may not make any further use of the Audubon Marks (e.g. “National Audubon Society”, “Audubon”) or the Audubon logo.

How to contribute your datasets:

Data can be stored in Movebank using your choice of public access permissions. After you have posted your data to Movebank, you will be asked to share the data with the Audubon Migratory Bird Initiative at the collaborator (with permission to download) or data manager level using Movebank’s tools. By doing so, you automatically grant Audubon a license to use your data, including ongoing access to any live data feeds, unless or until either you or Audubon cancel this agreement. Following cancellation and removal of access to the Movebank study, Audubon will no longer have access to any data updates, but will continue to have the use of previously shared data where it has been integrated into existing products or publications. Upon request, no further use of the data will be made in subsequent products or publications.

Best practices for data sharing are to provide collaborator access to aggregated studies—i.e. single studies containing all data for a project rather than multiple studies with subsets of data from the same larger project—and live data feeds in Movebank. When possible please include the following data attributes and reference information: capture location, individual relocations, individual identifier, locational error, timestamp, age, sex, and mortality location. Pre-/post-deployment records and erroneous outliers should be removed; there are a variety of tools in Movebank to help you with these tasks. Here is a link to a downloadable representative dataset that demonstrates these best practices.

Contact us if you need support—an Audubon or Movebank representative will assist you with contributing your data. Please provide datasets within one month of this agreement and respond in a timely manner to any questions regarding the data. For more information about the goals of Audubon’s Migratory Bird Initiative, visit audubon.org/migration. On behalf of Audubon, we express a sincere thank you for supporting conservation of migratory birds.