SPI-Birds Network & Database

The facility

SPI-Birds Network & Database, or the Studies of Populations of Individuals – Birds, is a grassroots initiative connecting those working on populations of individually-marked breeding birds. SPI-Birds is a metadata registry of individually-marked breeding bird studies and the people involved in these studies, and a central hub for data on individually-marked breeding birds, in their original format as well as in the SPI-Birds standard format, a community-defined data formatting standard and vocabulary. 
Researchers and members of the general public can become (non-)data-contributing members or data users.

Research topics 

Individually-marked breeding birds; bird populations; population monitoring; data archive; data reuse; data curation.

References

Culina, A., Adriaensen, F., Bailey, L. D., Burgess, M. D., Charmantier, A., Cole, E. F., Eeva, T., Matthysen, E., Nater, C. R., Sheldon, B. C., Sæther, B. E., Vriend, S. J. G., Zajkova, Z., Adamík, P., Aplin, L. M., Angulo, E., Artemyev, A., Barba, E., Barišić, S., ... Visser, M. E. (2021). Connecting the data landscape of long-term ecological studies: The SPI-Birds data hub. Journal of Animal Ecology, 90(9), 2147-2160. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13388

Running period

2019 – undetermined

Equipment/facilities

Database with data from population studies on individually-marked breeding birds.An R package with dataset-specific pipelines that convert data from their original format to the SPI-Birds standard format.

Network offering expert advice on setting up population monitoring studies, and collaborating in research projects

Data management

All data are FAIR. Full documentation on data standards can be found here: https://spibirds.org/en#documentation

Available datasets

An overview of all bird studies included can be found at: https://nioo.knaw.nl/en/projects/spi-birds/populations

To request access to the data, send an email to spibirds@nioo.knaw.nl, including a list of desired study sites and species, and a description of reasons for the data request. 

For terms of use, see: https://github.com/SPI-Birds/documentation/blob/master/terms_and_condit…;

Condition for access

Conditions for access are described in the terms of use (https://github.com/SPI-Birds/documentation/blob/master/terms_and_condit…) and data licenses (https://github.com/SPI-Birds/documentation/blob/master/terms_and_conditions/SPI_Birds_Data_Licenses.pdf). Unless data are shared under an open license, data contributors retain full ownership of their data when joining SPI-Birds and users will need to obtain permission from the data contributor before SPI-Birds shares data.