Lead: Dr Antica Culina, Netherlands Institute of Ecology
Funding: Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NIOO-KNAW, Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics (NTNU, Trondheim), NLBIF, and CEFE CNRS (Montpellier).
Summary: SPI-Birds is a network of researchers who collect data on breeding, individually marked birds. The SPI-Birds Network hosts breeding data from over 175 breeding populations of individually marked birds, in the original format as stored by researchers and in a SPI-Birds standardised data format that has been developed within the community (see here). The SPI-Birds team creates tailored R code pipelines to convert any data format into the standard one. This quality checks the data to correct for any mistakes, and warns the users about potential issues when using the data, acting as a central contact point for researchers to access data.
As well as helping the development of SPI-Birds, PiedFly.Net are using it as a safe and secure way of storing and utilising the datasets we hold, and to make large efficiencies in the way our data is managed and added to each year. The first of our datasets are now available through the SPI-Birds database.
For more information see here and this paper: Connected data landscape of long-term ecological studies: the SPI-Birds data hub (2021) A Culina, F Adriaensen, L Bailey, M Burgess, A Charmantier, E Cole, et al. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13388