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BIRDS OF THE WORLDA bit of history about Birds of the World, the oldest website providing checklists of the birds of the world by countryWorld's largest and most comprehensive BIRD AND NATURE website covers it all: 2000 pages on birds, nature, birdwatching, where to go birding, bird and nature picture, nature conservation, equipment, bird feeding, etc. Let me tell you a bit why and how it came to be. Let me start with myself. For a long time, birdlist was a fairly anonymous website listing the checklists of the birds of the world by country. But then I thought, maybe you, the web visitor actually likes to know what and who is behind these lists of the birds of the world and 2000 pages on nature and nature conservation. So let me tell you a bit how it came all about. I am Daan Vreugdenhil, have a PhD in conservation ecology, and dedicated 4 decades to the conservation of nature, for which I visited some 80 countries and learned 6 foreign languages, my native language being Dutch.
The idea of making a website listing the birds of the world by country occurred to me in the mid-nineties when there were still no non-commercial websites on line providing such information for all the countries of the world. As a lifetime conservation professional I was and still am extremely concerned about the lack of visitation in protected areas in developing countries. Worldwide, only a few of them enjoy a million or more visitors per year, the majority of them located in China. the best visited areas in most countries at best have a few hundred thousand of visitors and even Brazil only has one area with approximately 1 million visitors per year, Iguaçu National Park. The vast majority of areas have no visitors at all to a few hundreds per year! With so few benefits to the countries concerned, these areas are under great threat having their forests being cut down and wildlife being hunted to extinction. While working full time on assisting governments in developing countries, I kept on thinking how I could show people the way to find those fabulous national parks and nature reserves, so desperate in need of visitation. One day it occurred to me that birdwatchers are the most active "ecotourist" in the international ecotourism market. And what do travelling ecotourists want: Right, the checklist of the birds of the country the intend to visit. So what if I could offer a website with the Birds of the World by country? In those days, the Internet still was small compared to now, and if I remember well, there was only one site that tried to distribute data information by country from its own birding software, which needed to be purchased. The site that now calls itself Avibase, and was then listed as bsc-eoc.org, only distributed links; no real data. Its a petty they later copied my idea and started competing against our website, as together we could have been far more effective. Mision of Birds of the WorldThe mission of the new website for Birds of the World was to contribute to the conservation of nature and to help secure the future of birds and other species could survive in their natural environments by providing information on birds, protected areas, and nature across the Internet. Data sources for Birds of the WorldThere was no database in existence that I was aware off, so I bought the Sibley and Monroe's A World Checklist of Birds, tried to scan it, but that did not work with the software in those days. The names had to be typed by hand. So I hired a bunch of students and young biologists in Latin America to enter more than 13 000 names of species and subspecies of what probably was one of the first complete databases in the world listing all species of the birds of the world. Ahhh, so many typing mistakes.............. So those were the humble beginnings. I bought all the bird guides I could get me hands on, while my students kept coding away in that database. When I felt I had enough data and acquired birdlist.org and birdlist.com and went on line. As the internet developed and grew, more and more data became available, and one country and one state at the time, our data from bird guides were replaced by data from country and state committees for maintaining an official list. However, each committee uses its own methodology, so we had to figure out a way to interpret those data so that you, the birder could have a better idea on when to expect a bird and how great the likelihood would be to actually encounter it. So we developed a coding system indicating abundance and residing status, such as breeding, migration, wintering, endemic, etc. So depending on the source, the original data are now in the process of being updated and interpreted to our best ability to from the most recent sources available. Integrated web domainsCurrently we are working with a fulltime database manager in Bolivia, Wendy Duran, who scans the net for more information and continuously enters the data into our database. But the real challenge was on how to inform potential travelers to a country about the protected areas? Moreover, we have tons of really good information on nature and nature conservation. So we bought about 30 domains, each for a different theme that we wanted to develop. The most important ones are:
Nature Worldwide, Mammals Worldwide and National Parks Worldwide are each automatically linked from page to page so that you can jump back and forth between the country pages of those websites. That way, we are connecting the information of Birds of the World, with information on National Parks of the World and link information on Nature of the World, on a country page bases, providing checklists per country for birds and mammals and interesting information on nature we find interesting. So, as our websites developed, we found that it was more appropriate to call the collectively "Nature Worldwide" followed by the theme of each domain. The World Institute for Conservation and Environment, WICEOriginally incorporated (created) in 1989 to support a conservation effort to rescue the greatly threatened Cuyabeno Wildlife reserve with more visitation, by the mid nineties, the World Institute for Conservation and Environment expanded its orientation as it took charge of the creation and hosting of the websites you are now enjoying. It has been involved in many conservation efforts, the latest being the incorporation of the Adopt A Ranger Foundation. Birds of the World and other languagesHaving traveled to and worked in so many countries, I learned how most people struggle with the names of birds in other languages, so I started collecting names of species in local languages. In fact, it is the single most important obstacle for people to learn recognizing different species. How can you remember and distinguish them, if you can't name them. So far we collected the names of birds in some 20 languages, and completing the entire lists of the Birds of the World in Spanish, French, German and Dutch, while some volunteers are currently working on the Portuguese names. I have also put a lot of effort to have at least some key texts in some of the more common European languages. This has been criticized at times by some, always being native English speakers, who of course are completely happy being served in their own language. Well, sorry Anglos, there are more languages around than you learned in school :) Finding your wayEnough talk, for the bird checklists, go to BIRDS of the world For finding your way in our almost 2,000 pages, we invite you to our site map where you can choose from many themes on nature, or use the short version in our navigation bar in the left border. I hope you enjoy our websites, which has been completely created with private funding and lots of un-paid late night hours. If you want to volunteer a bit of your time by helping translating a page or two or by any other way you like, please send me an email. Dr. Ir. Daan Vreugdenhil
Thank you for visiting Nature Worldwide on Bird lists of the world. In this linked net of country pages you can find lists of birds, nature, mammals and national parks. Birds of the World provides a bird lists of all countries of the world. There are complete bird lists by country and where available in native languages, placed in ornithological taxonomic order. In Birds of the W you can find nature related websites, like on birding, birdwatching, general ornithology, nature, nature conservation, national parks, protected areas, nature reserves, etc. In Mammals of the World you can find the list of the mammals of the World in taxonomic order. National parks, Nature reserves and Protected areas of the World provides you with list of all the national parks and other protected areas of the World. Click on the following links for our other worldwide websites:
http://www.nature-worldwide.info/index.htm -- 121,054 (19 today) -- |
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