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Birda's Location Feature - All you need to know
Birda's Location Feature - All you need to know

Everything you need to know about Birda's Location feature.

John White avatar
Written by John White
Updated over a week ago

Birda's Locations feature is designed to help users find birding locations and the species that occur at the locations.

The 'Species' tab

The 'Species' tab shows a list of species that have been seen at the location over the last decade to give users an indication of what they could see if they were to visit a location.

The 'New for you' tab

The 'New for you' tab helps users find locations that have species that they have not yet seen. We do this by overlaying a user's life list and the location species list to create a list of species that the user has not yet seen that are known to have been seen at a location. For this to work best, make sure that your life list in Birda is up to date by importing any of your previous sighting records via our import page.

The Rarity Score

Each species in the locations species lists are assigned a rarity score that is specific to the location. The score is from 0 to 9 with 0 being the least rare (most common) and 9 being the most rare (least common) for the location.

The purpose of this score is to give users an indication of how common or rare any species is at any given location. So a bird species that may be considered very rare in a country could be considered relatively common at specific locations.

How does it work?

Birda makes use of users' sightings as well as over a billion open bird sighting records to populate the locations feature. Each sighting record is assigned to its closest location as long as it is within a specific radius of the location. We also have a sighting limit threshold which excludes locations with very few sighting records. This helps us only show popular birding locations where there has been significant birding activity in the past.

How often is it updated?

New sightings from Birda's users and external sources are fed into the database monthly. We anticipate this will be improved to daily updates in the near future.

What are the limitations?

Some locations may have just enough sighting records to be included as a location but not enough for the list to accurately account for all the species (and their rarity) that are likely to occur at a location.

Warning

Some locations may be situated on private property so please respect the laws and regulations of the country that you are based in.

Source

GBIF.org (18 July 2023) GBIF Occurrence Download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.7kaa23

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