Studying birds reveals changes in the environment we share

Professor Amanda D. Rodewald leads ornithology research and avian population studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her work exploring the intrinsic link between birds and humans is helping to make global conservation smarter.¹

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My story is a bit different to those of my colleagues. Many people got that spark for birding at a very young age, but for me it was more about being outdoors. I loved hiking as much as I loved playing in the alleys and climbing trees in the town where I grew up, here in New York State. It was nature – even within the confines of a city – that really drew me into this field.

The more I learned about birds, the more interested I became in them. I began to appreciate birds as a study organism and how they can teach us so much about the world around us.

Studying birds can contribute to solving the broader environmental challenges we face, as birds are excellent indicators of environmental conditions and sentinels of change. We live in the same environments as birds, so changes in bird populations alert us to changes in conditions around us. If an environment is not healthy enough to support bird populations, then it's unlikely to be healthy enough for people.

In this way we often refer to birds as being the canaries in the coal mine. Birds are everywhere. Different species occur in pretty much every habitat that we see around the world. Many species are specialized in their habitat requirements and are sensitive to changes in that environment.

People often think that with conservation we’re making a choice between protecting birds or doing things that may be good for human health and well-being. But the two are not mutually exclusive. Many of the actions needed to protect human health and well-being are the same actions we need for protecting birds. Those synergies are powerful, and birds help us to identify the connections.

One of my favorite examples is the win-win of a shade-grown coffee system I've spent a lot of time working with.

Coffee can be grown beneath the canopy of mature trees. This provides a great habitat for many birds, including both tropical residents and neotropical migratory species that spend the winter on coffee farms.

It turns out that shade-grown coffee also delivers a lot of benefits for farmers, the environment and the whole industry around coffee. This is because when you cultivate coffee under trees, it grows more slowly and tends to be of a better quality that fetches a higher price.

The trees also enrich soils and thus make farms more productive, while the birds that are attracted consume many of the insect pests that reduce coffee yields. This is protective for human health, as it reduces the need to apply pesticides and fertilizers. The trees stabilize slopes too, which lowers the risk of landslides.

When you look at it broadly – whether you're focused on coffee quality, getting a good price for the coffee you grow, protecting human health or promoting bird conservation – the approach is the same. The trees on the farms are a win-win.

At the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Center for Avian Population Studies, we try to start from the perspective of learning and understanding what our different partners and audiences really care about.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is an amazing place, but it can be hard to describe! On the one hand, we're a research and scientific institution that innovates on the science and technology side of things. On the other hand, we're an outreach and education center that engages with millions of people around the world every year. What ties those parts together is our passion for understanding and protecting the natural world and biodiversity.

The Center for Avian Population Studies is where we harness the power of big data for use in science and environmental decision-making. This means acquiring the data as well as curating, archiving, analyzing and translating them.

Some of the really exciting projects we're doing relate to precision conservation. This is about trying to leverage the wealth of information we have about birds in the natural world, so we can be more strategic about the conservation we're doing.

What we really need is not just more conservation – we need smarter conservation. I'm talking about doing the right intervention in the right place and at the right time. This requires a lot of information, which we’re fortunate to have thanks to the work we do with citizen scientists all over the globe.

Citizen science is a way of engaging with people who are interested in nature or other subjects. By working with them we can collect data to gain new insights that enable better decision making. This practice is really revolutionizing how we can approach science and conservation – not just for birds, but much more broadly too.

It’s exciting for me to think of individual citizen scientists going out and collecting information. This is something that people really enjoy doing. It's a form of recreation, but it’s also an act of generosity to the world. The information these citizen scientists gather is empowering individuals, communities and organizations to make better decisions about the environments we live in.

If you think about the conservation context, we as the researchers are not the ones out there applying management on the ground – it’s our partners who are doing that. We try to support them through our science and our data assets.

What we're challenged to do as scientists or conservationists is to find the authentic and compelling connections that people care about. This is what we're trying to do. You could be working toward what’s important to you, and it turns out there's a lot of synergy with other issues. For us it’s about making these connections so we can form the right partnerships.

Ornithology is in a really exciting period now, as there’s so much changing with technological and computational advances. We’re at a point where the amount of information we have has never been richer.

One of the transformative elements of ornithology is going to come from being able to integrate data from different modalities. Whether it's eDNA, radar data, citizen-science data, tracking data or bioacoustics – bringing all of this together is going to transform our understanding of bird populations and their environments.

The eBird online database is one of our flagship participatory science projects here at the Cornell Lab. It was originally developed for birdwatchers to share their observations with one another. There was always an aspiration for these data to be useful for science, and now after 20 years we’re seeing this starting to happen. With more than 1.5 billion observations of birds from every country on the planet, eBird has become the largest and fastest accumulating biodiversity database in the world! That is only possible because of the generosity and commitment of partners and nearly one million observers. It’s a global collaboration.

I know it’s bleak sometimes when we look out there at the current situation. I don’t want to minimize how serious the challenges are that we face, but there are two big things that really give me hope for the future.

One is that we have more information on birds than we’ve ever had before. This knowledge is power. It gives us the ability to detect changes in populations and the environment, and it allows us to be more strategic in our ability to apply the right conservation interventions in the right places at the right time.

The other reason I’m optimistic is that it’s no longer necessary to try and convince people to care about birds specifically. What we now need to do is show the connections between what people care about and how those things relate to bird conservation. This convergence of the steps we need to take is something that gives me hope.