Greetings!
The North American Bird Phenology Program (BPP) has recently been revived this spring and is well on its way to becoming a fully operational program. The BPP is very pleased to be apart of USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, surrounded by research programs dedicated to monitoring the status and trends of North American bird populations.
All six million files have recently been moved to the BPP office where species inventory was taken and is currently under revision, since there have been many taxonomic changes over the years. We have approximately 900 species in our files and are excited to get all of this information into our database!
Volunteers have begun coming into the BPP office but we are still looking for many more who can scan the migration cards through our high-speed scanners so that they can become viewable online. At this time, we have scanned around 1000 files and with more volunteers we will be able to greatly increase the rate of production.
The online database is still in development but we hope to have it accessible on our website in the coming weeks. I will send out an E-Newsletter when it becomes available so that online participants around the country will be able to convert the pdf files of the migration cards into the database.
Please contact me if you have any questions and don’t forget to check out the BPP website for more information. The website is under constant revision and more content will be added soon.
Sincerely,
Jessica Zelt
Program Coordinator