With more people than ever taking part, the annual Audubon event is a growing force for science and nature conservation.
This trove of information has helped usher in entire new areas of research, like climate change ecology, says Benjamin Zuckerberg, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work in the field utilizes large community science datasets to explore how birds, including common winter denizens such as Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Purple Finches, and Carolina Wrens, are shifting their movements in response to changes in temperatures. The data enable scientists to find answers to questions at an “unprecedented” level, Zuckerberg says.