Hello Atlas Volunteers and VA Birders!
Hope this finds you out enjoying the long-delayed Fall weather! As you
know, we are in the process of compiling and organizing the breeding data
you collected this spring and summer. Thanks to all of your efforts the
database has grown to slightly monstrous proportions! This is exciting and
also means that we have a lot to sort through prior to publishing our
post-season project update.
Along the way, we’d like to keep you posted on exciting preliminary
results, so *we will be sharing project updates with the volunteer
community each week*.
This week, we wanted to recognize the *colossal number of hours* that Atlas
volunteers have logged to the VABBA2 thus far…
In 2018, volunteers reported *18,000 *hours of field time. This brings the
project total (since March 2016) to *47,000 *hours of birding effort! To
put these hours in perspective, this equates to one person working
full-time during the breeding season for… *98 years!* ...Now is when atlas
volunteers should be giving themselves a nice pat on the back. :)
The VA birding community should take pride in the volunteer ethic that
these results so clearly demonstrate. Our volunteer birders' commitment to
documenting the current breeding status and distribution of VA’s birds is
already yielding a wealth of new and valuable data.
If you’re curious to see how effort hours are distributed around the state,
check out the *Atlas Effort Maps*on our project eBird portal at
https://ebird.org/atlasva/effortmap. These maps give you clear picture of
which regions are well-surveyed and which will be the focus of more
intensive effort in the final two years of this project.
Stay tuned for more highlights from the 2018 field season and thanks for
all you do for VA’s birds!
Ashley Peele, PhD
Virginia Breeding Bird Atlas Coordinator
Conservation Management Institute - Virginia Tech
Office: 540-231-9182
Fax: 540-231-7019