Avian Knowledge Network

The Avian Knowledge Network (AKN) is an international organization of government and non-government institutions focused on understanding the patterns and dynamics of bird populations across the Western Hemisphere. The AKN is organizing observation-based bird monitoring in three fundamental ways. First, it is developing new ways to discover these data by displaying metadata in the bird monitoring data registry. Second, it is expanding existing data schemas to organize these data through the bird monitoring data exchange. Third, it is building the technical infrastructure to allow access to these data through a federated data grid environment. It is bringing together observation data on birds, data from bird-monitoring, bird-banding, and broad-scale citizen-based bird-surveillance programs.