Welcome to the American Ornithological Society 2018 Annual Conference. We are pleased to have you join us at the lovely Hilton El Conquistador Resort in Tucson, AZ.
Audubon's Christmas Bird Count (hereafter “CBC”) is a community science bird census program that has been continuously conducted for 118 years. From its origins as a citizen science activity to promote conservation of birds, the cumulative results have become one of the two most important sources of data for the study of bird distribution and population trends across North America. While the CBC was begun as a conservation activity, from the beginning effort data were collected in addition to the avian results. The evolution of the embracing of such citizen science data sets was long in coming, but in the past few decades the CBC, and by default other citizen or community science data sets, have become widely utilized by the scientific community as a valuable source of information for study. This presentation will explore the acceptance of the Christmas Bird Count by the ornithological and conservation communities as a crucial resource, and document some of its many uses in past, present, and future ornithological studies and conservation efforts. Also discussed will be the growing set of tools utilizing CBC data that are becoming available to the conservation science community.
