The Migratory Bird Initiative Collection

The Migratory Bird Initiative (MBI) Collection is a compilation of bird migration studies in Movebank contributed by researchers to the National Audubon Society's Migratory Bird Initiative. Thanks to the numerous institutions and researchers across the Americas that have contributed, this collection includes 233 studies documenting migrations of 141 species. Together, these data contain over 46 million locations of nearly 8,000 animals from 1965 to the present. Many of these studies are in the Bird Migration Explorer (launched September 2022).

Migratory Bird Initiative

Established in 2018, the Migratory Bird Initiative's mission is to secure the future of migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere by reducing direct threats and protecting critical places across the Americas in coordination with science, conservation, and policy partners. The MBI brings together the latest spatial information on species distributions and movements to identify priority areas for 458 species of migratory birds that breed and regularly occur in the United States and Canada. Audubon will use this information to define where and how to focus conservation investments for protecting, restoring, and managing essential habitats and mitigating threats for these species across their full annual cycle.

Migratory Bird Initiative boundary

Due to the geographic scope of the Migratory Bird Initiative and the focus on North American breeding migratory birds, studies contributed to MBI primarily include tags deployed on birds within the United States and Canada, including offshore islands within these countries' respective Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). Additional tags deployed outside this region have been included for target species if any birds migrated through North America or its waters.

How to participate

The Bird Migration Explorer is a publicly available, free online application viewable on computer, tablet, or mobile devices. Built on three primary data types, the Bird Migration Explorer includes range and abundance, connection, and pathway data. Pathway data, documenting movements of individual birds, are derived from tracking devices using GPS, Argos Doppler, light-level geolocation, and automated radio telemetry, and allow the Bird Migration Explorer to illustrate the migrations of North American birds across the Americas.

Data owners

To share tracking data on North American birds for the Bird Migration Explorer, please email migratorybirds@audubon.org. For more information on the Migratory Bird Initiative and additional details on sharing and limitations, please read the MBI Data Sharing and Use Policy. If you have not already, you can create a study on Movebank and add your migratory bird tracking data to include it in the MBI collection. Contact us for assistance.

Benefits of participation include

• 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 extensive and varied audience of birdwatchers, researchers, educators, decision-makers, and funders.
• Participation will promote peer collaboration 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. For example, your data can be safely deposited for long-term archiving, easily shared among your collaborators, organized across device types in a common format, and linked to other environmental data sources.

Data users

The data shared with the Migratory Bird Initiative were contributed through data sharing agreements that limit our ability to re-share data. Requests for data should be directed to the contributing data holder or organization, according to the data owners' terms set on Movebank. To search for participating studies, review the table below for studies relevant to your proposed use. The table contains links to each study for additional information.

Citation

To cite individual data sources contained within the MBI Collection, please see Movebank's citation guidelines. To cite maps or information from the Bird Migration Explorer, please use
Smith MA, Mahoney J, Knight EJ, Taylor L, Seavy NE, Bailey OH, Carbone M, DeLuca W, Gonzalez NS, Jimenez MF, O'Bryan GMW, Rao N, Witko CJ, Wilsey C, Deppe JL. 2022. Bird Migration Explorer. National Audubon Society, New York, NY. Accessed on [date] at birdmigrationexplorer.org.

Contact

With questions related to Movebank, contact support@movebank.org. With questions related to the Migratory Bird Initiative or Bird Migration Explorer, contact Audubon at migratorybirds@audubon.org.

Participating studies

The following studies are participating in the MBI Collection as of August 2023. Select a study from the list to learn more about each project. See Movebank's user manual for general instructions on browsing and accessing data. For the data included on the Bird Migration Explorer, please see the Explorer's Data Providers page for a list of the hundreds of participating institutions and citations for all contributing datasets.