Wayne's final point reminds me of a famous "Journal of Irreproducible
Results" article from years ago. The study involved putting out a commercial
"seed bell" in the scientist's back yard, watching for a specified time
period and recording the numbers of birds, species, sex (when possible), age
and so forth, that came in to feed.

The article contained tons of graphs and formulae calculating diversity,
species richness etc. etc.

The only problem was that, during the observation period, NO birds came in.
Thus all the results were: 0

But -- despite the humorous venue for publication, there were some
conclusions: 

"Seed bells" are junk, or (less likely) there were no birds living in the
author's neighborhood.

Gail Mackiernan
Colesville, MD

on 11/18/2010 6:21 PM, Wayne Baumgartner at  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
> 
> 
><snip>