SaveBirds

The severe and ongoing challenge of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) is to ensure that 40,000 protected areas (PAs) of North America maintain their significance level. There is a need to answer some essential questions to address this subject matter. - Have the PAs been initially located correctly? - Have they retained their importance over the past half-century? - Do some of these areas need to be removed from the list, and do others need to be protected? There is a vital need for big data and, of course, an appropriate tool to mine the data to answer the fundamental questions. Fortunately, birds are a proxy to check the status of PAs, and since 1966, the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) has been collecting structured data of 800 bird species from 300,000 locations, across North America as the BBS dataset. In the presence of this valuable dataset, we have developed a web application called SaveBirds to enable ecologists, biologists, landscape managers, and authorities to evaluate the status of PAs in any region of North America.