eBird Android—Automatically Track Your Birding

Wednesday August 9, 2017   |

Never worry about tracking time or distance again with new eBird Mobile tracks.

eBird Android—Automatically Track Your Birding

eBird Mobile for Android took a big step forward this week: the ability to keep 'tracks' of where you eBird. Every time you start a checklist on eBird Android, you now have the option to keep a GPS track of where you walk for your traveling counts. The 'tracks' automatically calculate the distance traveled and time spent eBirding—all you have to do is watch birds! This is an important new chapter in eBird, opening the door for many exciting new future tools: improved research that can use the actual path you birded, eBird data outputs that can show the precise path of any given checklist, and much more. Plus, it makes your birding even easier. Try eBird Android today.

One of the most important benefits of tracks is the ability to truly understand where you were birding on a given checklist. With each tracks checklist, eBird will record the location and distance (as for all eBird lists), but also the precise GPS track. This will make a real difference for habitat associations when generating STEM models, as well as other future eBird tools. Future hotspots could be polygon-based, aggregating all of the checklists that fall within that polygon. Or when visiting a hotspot for the first time, you could pull up recent checklists and see exactly where eBirders have been on the trails. All this and more is possible in the coming years.

Learn more at: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/ebird-android-automatically-track-your-birding/