Urban areas highlight a fundamental citizen-science trade-off between simple field protocols that attract volunteers and complex field protocols that ensure useful data. There is great potential for community based, ecological monitoring in urban areas because of the dense pool of potential volunteers. However, these environments present unique and complicated challenges to rigorous data collection because of their complex and dynamic nature – noise, activity, complex structure. Volunteers for the Ottawa Breeding Bird Count (OBBC) monitor birds in an urban setting. They use relatively complex, point-count protocols that allow us to account for the highly variable levels of background noise and activity in the city. The OBBC runs an enjoyable and popular bird-song identification course in the early spring. We also conducted a lab-based study to see if the accuracy of auditory bird-song identification was affected by varying levels of traffic noise.

Results/Conclusions

Since running the course, volunteers have readily collected measures of both traffic intensity and bird observations that are suitable for estimating true abundance using removal models (Farnsworth et al. 2002. Auk 119:414). The lab-based study showed that background traffic noise significantly reduces the number of species recorded during a single point count. The training course was highly popular, increased our pool of volunteers, and showed that volunteers were willing and able to collect the more complicated data. After analysing the field observations, we found that the more complicated protocols were necessary as simple unadjusted point count observations significantly underestimated the abundance of many species when traffic was high.