DEMO VIEWER

Unraveling European-wide spatiotemporal patterns of bird distribution

Mobilizing 100,000 volunteer birdwatchers and 40 million new bird records every year

Week

Speed

Corrected regional occurrence (CRO) map

These maps make use of a complex set of spatial and temporal aggregation and smoothing procedures to account for differences in observational effort and species reporting rates. They are specifically intended to help visualize large-scale temporal changes in bird distribution and thus they aren't necessarily accurate at the local scale. For each 30x30 km square and week these maps depict the estimated regional frequency of occurrence of the selected species. Areas where estimated occurrences are more unreliable due to data scarcity can be shaded off by turning on the Low Resolution (LR) areas layer.

Modelling bird distributions in time and space is one of the main objectives of the EBP project. However, this is a work in progress and, therefore, it has to be stressed that these maps are very preliminary.

Corrected regional occurrence (CRO) map

Minimum temperature map

These maps show the minimum temperature for each 30x30 km square and week (recalculated from E-OBS high-resolution gridded dataset v10.0).

How to use the viewer

Select any combination of species (or climatic variable), year and map type and click the refresh button to change the animation.
To better assess the seasonal movements of partial migrants choose July to June interannual cycles (e.g. 2014/15), rather than natural years in the year dropdown list.
Select "All years" in the year dropdown list to visualize overall seasonal patterns based on the combination of the six years of available data.
Moving the time slider backwards and forward can be very helpful to better grasp the distributional changes over time.
You can stop the animation or move on a weekly basis by clicking on the corresponding buttons in the time slider.
The speed of the animation can be changed using the dedicated slider.
Species maps show the study area (countries submitting data) with a distinct shade. However, the coverage is still far from complete in some areas. Therefore, to avoid misinterpretations all surveyed 30x30 km squares, not only those where the selected species was recorded are depicted in some of these maps (occurrence, traces and counts).
The data provided by the most recent EBP partners will be shown in the viewer in late summer, once the viewer is updated with the data for the period 2010-2016.

The viewer

The EuroBirdPortal (EBP) demo viewer shows a set of five different animated maps depicting the week-by-week distributional patterns of 100 species in six years (2010-2015) at a resolution of 30x30 km. Moreover, temperature and precipitation maps (E-OBS v.10.0) are also shown for comparative purposes. Two animated maps of any species or climatic variable, year and type can be selected to be shown simultaneously for direct comparison, offering more than 20 million of different map combinations to choose from.

More information about the viewer

The EBP project

The EBP is a project of the European Bird Census Council (EBCC) developed through a partnership that currently comprises 80 institutions from 29 different countries.

The purpose of EBP is to establish a European data repository based on aggregated data from online bird recording portals from across Europe with the following major objectives:

1 To describe large-scale spatiotemporal patterns of bird distributions (seasonal distributional changes, migratory patterns, phenology) and their changes over time.

2 To improve the value of online data gathering portals.

More information about EuroBirdPortal