‘Lost’ birds list will aid in protecting species

[Laura Bies]

From the Cornell Chronicle:

A group of scientists has released the first comprehensive list of birds that haven’t been documented in more than a decade, with the help of Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Their methods, and the global list of “lost” birds, have been published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

“We started with the Macaulay Library because it is the richest depository of bird media, and we quicky found documentation for the vast majority of the world’s birds,” said lead author Cameron Rutt, a bird biologist with American Bird Conservancy at the time of the research. “We also used data from iNaturalist and xeno-canto. We looked for species not represented at all with a recent image, video or sound recording. A species would be considered ‘lost’ to science if there was no media of the bird within the past 10 years or more.”

The list was generated on behalf of the Search for Lost Birds at American Bird Conservancy. This project is a global partnership among American Bird Conservancy, Re:wild and BirdLife International. Repeating this data exercise every year or two will help capture new species approaching the 10-year benchmark without searchable media.

The study’s authors collated 42 million photos, videos and audio records – with more than 33 million from the Macaulay Library alone. Out of all the records, 144 species – 1.2% of all known bird species – qualified as lost.

Read the rest here.