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 goal is to educate the public on the dynamics of bird populations, provide interactive decision-making tools for land managers, make available a data resource for scientific research, and advance new exploratory analysis techniques to study bird populations. Additionally, the AKN has gathered over 1300 environmental, climate, and human demographic variables that are linked to all AKN bird observation locations. The AKN is organizing observation-based bird monitoring in three fundamental ways. First, we are developing new ways to discover these data by displaying metadata in the bird monitoring data registry (BMDR). Second, we are expanding existing data schemas to organize these data through the bird monitoring data exchange (BMDE). Third, we are building the technical infrastructure to allow access to these data through a federated data grid environment. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]
