Facilitating More Informed & Coordinated Bird Conservation Efforts
Although the ability to facilitate and improve the environmental review process is a common need of federal agencies on the Council, it is not the only need the National Node effort can help address. For instance, several federal agencies on the Council, including National Park Service (NPS), Forest Service (FS) and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) regularly conduct bird conservation work as part of their agency’s every day work. The National Node can help these agencies and other organizations that have bird conservation as part of their mission or mandate conduct better, and more coordinated bird conservation efforts in a number of ways.
Agencies/organizations have a place to easily store and share their data with others, if desired: Having the ability to store the data collected through various survey and monitoring efforts in a database that enables and facilitates both data security and data storage is an appealing and smart choice for a lot of agencies and organizations. Many agencies/organization have lots of data, but it’s not very useful, because they can’t easily access, share or analyze it.
Agencies/organizations can ensure their data is formatted properly and usable in AKN analysis and summary tools: Users can follow standard data formats and data entry procedures, which ensures that data is described in a way that will work with other data in the system and with various data summary and analysis tools created to work with the data in AKN.
Agencies/organizations can do broad-scale, coordinated conservation: Having the ability to look at data on a larger scale alongside data other agencies and organizations have been collecting strengthens the ability to do more strategic and informed landscape-level conservation and coordinate better with other agencies and organizations who are working toward the same goal.