Partners In Flight (PIF) is a partnership of federal and state agencies, industry, non-governmental organizations, and many others, with the goal of conserving North American birds. In 1991, PIF began developing a formal species assessment process that could provide consistent, scientific evaluations of conservation status across all bird species in North America, and identify areas most important to the conservation of each species. This process applies quantitative rule sets to complex biological data on the population size, distribution, population trend, threats, and regional abundance of individual bird species to generate simple numerical scores that rank each species in terms of its biological vulnerability and regional status. The process results in global and regional conservation assessments of each bird species that, among other uses, can be used to objectively assign regional and continental conservation priorities among birds.

The information used and generated by this process is housed in the PIF species assessment database which is maintained by the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory and made available to the public through this website. The species assessment scores and other assessment data can be viewed on-line to quickly and easily examine and compare the conservation status of individual bird species, either globally or within a particular geographic area.  Scores and other information from the database can also be downloaded and used in any number of ways to examine various aspects of the biology and conservation of North American birds.  Although past iterations of this database have included scores for U.S. states and PIF physiographic areas, PIF is no longer maintaining those scores and instead has adopted Bird Conservation Regions (BCRs), the common planning unit under the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, as the geographic scale for updated regional bird conservation assessments. 

Currently, RMBO maintains PIF species assessment data on all bird species in the U.S. and Canada, and hopes to fully incorporate the Mexican avifauna within the next year.  Traditionally, information on all species has been available via this website, however, PIF is currently not serving this information for species other than landbirds.  Database users interested in obtaining species assessment data for waterbirds, shorebirds, and waterfowl are urged to go to those initiatives’ websites for information.

The species assessment scores and process has recently been updated!  Check out the new scores and make sure to download and read the updated Handbook on Species Assessment, which contains important information on the how scores are derived and used in the assessment process.  Note that currently only breeding-season regional scores are available for BCRs.  We hope to have non-breeding scores available soon.  For those needing access to the previous versions of the PIF Species Assessment Database, including past regional scores for physiographic areas, click here.