About BSABirds

BSABirds is an Eagle Scout project created by Alessio Toniolo of Troop 74 in Atlanta, Georgia. The project aims to help the City of Brookhaven keep a track of the popultation counts of many different bird species in the area.

How It Works

When someone visits a Brookhaven park, there will be a BSABirds yard sign or flyer on a bulletin board near the entrance/center of the park with a QR code to scan. Alternitavely, they can visit https://bsabirds.vercel.app.

On the website, you can visit the Track Birds page to either take a picture of a bird you find in a park, or to enter the species manually. Once submitted, a record of this bird sighting will remain in a cloud database.

Data Collection

Since this project does not ID birds individually, there of course is always the possibility that the same bird is recorded more than once. However, this issue does not affect population counts because population statistics are measured annually. By only taking the total number of sightings at the end of every year, we can measure population changes from year to year with accuracy. In addition, the year constant was chosen due to its likelyhood of eliminating data variance.

Why Birds?

Birds are a keystone species in the environment. A keystone species can indicate deteriorating habitat quality and environmental pollution, as well as insights to determine the success of restoration efforts like seed dispersal, pest control, habitat construction, etc.

Ways you can help

Outside of contributing to the database of bird recordings on BSABirds, you can support your own local environment in these ways:

• Learning about
  • How to ID birds
  • Bird behavior
  • Population trends
• Creating habitats in your backyard
  • Bird Feeders
  • Bird Houses
  • Bird Baths
  • Plants & Flowers
• Contribute to local park's tourism
  • Share your love for birds
  • Participate in bird surveys and censuses
  • Join local birding clubs

Bird Classification

The most superb aspect of this project is the bird classificaiton feature. Based off of a dataset of over 60,000 images of birds and 400 species, a machine learning model uses training data from this dataset to make predictions on given images of birds based off of patterns observed from the training period.

Final Notes

BSABirds is made possible by the everyday users of the app who allow population counts to be accurate and beneficial to the City of Brookhaven's environment for birds.