To add my two cents:  It is my understanding that eBird strives to be
both a database for scientific data and top notch personal bird
listing software.  It needs to be both to get enough "citizen
scientists" to participate because few of us are going to have the
time to enter our data in two different programs--eBird and a personal
listing program.  In terms of use as personal listing software it is
already very good, and has made improvements every year.  I expect
"going global" took a tremendous amount of person-hours and resources,
but is now almost fully implemented.  I think we need to be patient,
but I'm confident future improvements are to come.  They already
indicated county level eBird alert emails, which I think would be the
ideal solution to the problem Tyler Bell mentioned, are something they
are planning to implement.  If you want to speed things along, I'm
sure they'd appreciate a donation every once in a while to help fund
their efforts.

Jim Moore
Rockville, MD

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Wayne Baumgartner <> wrote:
> I have emailed with the eBird development people on this very topic.  This
> was several months ago, and they said that they were planning on
> implementing these features after they rolled out eBird coverage to the
> entire world.
>
> I guess we should remember that eBird was developed not primarily for bird
> listing, but for scientists.  I am always reminded of this when I wearily
> enter observations in eBird when no birds were seen, or only a very few
> uninteresting ones -- no birds seen is an important data point, too.
>
>
>  -Wayne Baumgartner
>     Washington, DC
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Ross Geredien <>wrote:
>
>> Great topic, Tyler.  One suggestion I had for the eBird team was to be able
>> to use the alerts tools for this or similar purpose.  For example, I use the
>> alerts for my cumulative Maryland list, but wouldn't it be great if you
>> could customize it for any given year, or any given jurisdiction besides a
>> state, i.e. a county, or a location?I don't see a way that you could obtain
>> this information simply by sorting the lists, unless an additional field
>> were added in the cumulative list for a county.  This field could be called
>> "Seen by You" or "Not seen by You", and an "X" would be inserted
>> accordingly.  This would require data model modification and would therefore
>> have to be done at the staff level in Ithaca.
>> Ross
>>
>> --- On Thu, 11/18/10, James Tyler Bell <> wrote:
>>
>> From: James Tyler Bell <>
>> Subject: [MDOSPREY] eBird county/state wish list?
>> To: 
>> Date: Thursday, November 18, 2010, 4:27 PM
>>
>> eBird users are probably aware of the Top 100 feature where you can select
>> state
>> or county then either year or all time. I'm curious if anyone has an easy
>> way to
>> figure out from your all time list which species are missing. It shows you
>> the
>> total species for the year or all time but wouldn't it be nice to be able
>> to
>> quickly display which ones you are missing? e.g., my St. Mary's eBird list
>> (which isn't my complete St. Mary's list) is 268 while the cummulative list
>> is
>> 319. If I could figure out a quick way to sort out the missing species, I'd
>> put
>> some extra effort into digging out those species or certainly chase them if
>> reported ;)
>>
>> Tyler Bell
>> 
>> California, Maryland
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>