Birds Canada goes high tech to better understand what avian populations reveal about the environment

A new app has launched in an effort to track and protect dwindling bird populations.

A new app developed for Birds Canada is designed to help scientists and volunteers collect information about birds and their population, faster and with greater precision.

The charity teamed up with Punchcard Systems to create the NatureCounts mobile app.

Whether it’s a tree swallow or a yellow-headed blackbird, all species play a critical role in helping scientists monitor environmental health.

“They’re a great canary in the coal mine, the first indicator that will tell us, ‘Oh, something might be wrong here,’” says Catherine Jardine with Birds Canada.

For decades, bird counts were conducted with pen and clipboard, a method that was not only time consuming, but hardly foolproof.

“That introduced a lot of potential for errors,” says Kyle Horner of Birds Canada.

“At some point somebody has got to interpret that handwriting, or maybe it’s rained on the data sheets,’ he said, giving examples of how the old-school method impacted the results.

Now, that’s changing, because new data can be entered on the spot.

Birds Canada told CTV News that NatureCounts, is already having an impact with five years of research all digitized and easily accessible.

“We’re reducing errors,” Jardine explains. “We are making things faster and more efficient. We’re eliminating tedious data entry so that conservation happens faster.”

Even better, the app isn’t just for scientists.

It includes features that let the public join in as “citizen scientists", contributing to bird monitoring and helping expand the reach of environmental research.