Data by country Home ยป content

BirdPhotos.com uses the IOU (International Ornithologists' Union) database as a basis for naming, taxonomy, and broad regional information. The goal of IOU is to provide consistent English naming for all species. Their second goal is to track all of the latest taxonomic 'split', 'joins', and reclassifications, and to be on the 'cutting edge' of ornithological science.

We wanted to be able to display information for individual countries, so we undertook a big project of collecting country bird lists, primarily from Wikipedia, and reconciling them with IOU, Avibase and Birdlife. Our goal is to be able to integrate the per-country information into checklists, the quiz, searches, and eventually general navigation.

This work is almost complete. So now we have a database that is some ways is as current and complete as anything else out there. It is the latest version of IOU with per-country information, IUCN redlist, foreign language names, and range maps, and the goal is to maintain this with ongoing taxonomy and naming changes. But to be clear, our database is is no where on the same scale as Avibase, which tracks different taxonomic classifications and keeps historical information.