After decades of meticulous work by conservation biologist Çağan Şekercioğlu and his team, the 'BIRDBASE' dataset has been released to the public, providing an extensive look at ecological traits across 11,589 bird species. As detailed by At The U, this groundbreaking dataset covers essential information such as body mass, habitat, diet, nest type, and conservation status, paving the way for future ornithological research.
Conceived in 1999 by Şekercioğlu, then a Stanford University grad student, the BIRDBASE project was fueled by a personal quest to understand the extinction threat level of insectivore birds in tropical forest understories. "I realized that statistic doesn’t exist because nobody had analyzed all the birds of the world and their threat status based on diet," Şekercioğlu told At The U. His real-life application of this data revealed that 27% of these insectivores were threatened, a somewhat surprising statistic given their important ecological roles.
This significant body of work, described in the study titled "BIRDBASE: A Global Dataset of Avian Biogeography, Conservation, Ecology and Life History Traits," was recently discussed in a journal article by Scientific Data. Coming at a momentous time alongside the release of AviList, the first unified global checklist for birds, BIRDBASE promises to empower ornithologists and conservation biologists with data previously scattered or unavailable. The importance of such an endeavor cannot be overstated, with Şekercioğlu and his colleagues investing nearly 30 person-years into the project.
Available as an Excel spreadsheet via Figshare, BIRDBASE makes it easy for researchers to access details on various traits with the convenience of being housed under a single digital roof. Despite the colossal effort already invested, Şekercioğlu emphasizes that the dataset is a work in progress, akin to "a medieval cathedral that is open for worship, but never really finished," he said, as obtained by At The U.
