Citizen scientists map the flyways of North American birds

Flyways used by migratory birds as they travel across America have long been a topic of fascination for ornithologists. For larger species like waterfowl that are easily visible during their migratory flights, these flyways have been described, but until now the flyways for smaller-bodied birds have been largely based on conjecture.

New research in the Journal of Biogeography has used analyses of information from the eBird citizen-science database to describe week by week the distributions of 93 North American land birds. By determining the level of similarity in the locations of bird distributions across time, the researchers were able to identify, for the first time, three migration flyways located in the western, central, and eastern portions of the continent.