New York State Breeding Bird Atlases: 1980-2005

New York State's breeding bird distribution was documented across two distinct time periods, 1980-1985 and 2000-2005. The dataset contains over 881,000 cumulative records submitted by thousands of volunteer observers. It is published by the state government organization data.ny.gov.

Use Cases

• Analyzing changes in breeding bird distribution between the 1980s and early 2000s using the 'Year' and 'Breeding Status' columns.
• Mapping species presence at the county or block level for conservation planning using 'County' and 'Block ID'.
• Studying species-specific breeding behaviors and family classifications via 'Breeding Behavior', 'Family Name', and 'Scientific Name'.
• Assessing state and federal protection statuses for species using 'NYS Protection Status' and 'Fed. Region' columns.

Strengths

• Contains a large volume of observations, with over 361,583 records for the first atlas and 519,570 for the second.
• Data collection involved a large community effort, with over 4,300 participants for the first atlas and 1,200 for the second.
• Provides a long-term comparison across two distinct decades (1980-1985 and 2000-2005).

Limitations

• Key metadata such as exact row counts, data size, license, and author are inconsistently reported or missing across platforms.
• The dataset's temporal coverage is discontinuous, with a gap of approximately 15 years between the two survey periods.

Provenance

Source

data.ny.gov

Collection Method

Community science project with data submitted by thousands of volunteer observers.

Time Range

1980-2005

Freshness

2026-04-04 23:13:50.177532

Geography

New York State, USA