Denis Lepage1, Steve Kelling2 & Elizabeth Martin3
1 Bird Studies Canada, Port Rowan, Ontario, Canada
2 Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, USA
3 U.S. Geological Survey - NBII, Gainesville, Florida, USA
Over the past several years, a working group of representatives from NGOs, government and academia has been developing a schema to describe and exchange North American bird monitoring data in a standardized way. We based our schema on DarwinCore largely because of its simplicity and ease of implementation. The schema, the Bird Monitoring Data Exchange (BMDE), contains all the fields from the DarwinCore (55 fields in version 1.3), plus 36 additional fields specific to bird monitoring. Most of the additional fields are for descriptions of the sampling protocol, information on the survey site and effort measurements. Because DarwinCore is a flat schema (as opposed to having a hierarchical structure like ABCD), it was not easy to describe negative (absence) data, an essential component of monitoring data. We address this issue by 1) generating 2 consecutive queries on the data (one for the list of all monitoring events, and one for the bird records) and 2) by including a field that identifies monitoring events that did not generate any observation. Currently, BMDE is functioning via standard DiGIR protocols. A new Java interface to DiGIR is under development to retrieve structured data from multiple heterogeneous and distributed bird monitoring databases.
We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation and the National Biological Information Infrastructure.