2020-11-07: I completed a thorough review of the checklists for
Sudan and
South Sudan, mainly based on the
Atlas of Sudan Birds published in 1984, and some more recent datasets and publications. At the same time, I have also cleaned up the eBird filters for the 2 countries, which should help with data quality in this poorly covered region.
2020-10-03: I have started the long process of updating my master taxonomy to bring in more closely aligned to the IOC checklist. My previous major update was based on the Howard and Moore checklist, which is unfortunately not being actively maintained. The choice of going with the IOC is based on the fact that the new list of the
Working Group Avian Checklists (WGAC) of the International Ornithologists' Union (IOU) , which aims to bring together all the major world list, will be initially based on the IOC 10.2 list. Due to my role in WGAC, I intend to continue trying to maintain the Avibase list as closely aligned as possible to WGAC going forward. This is a relatively tedious process that I expect will spread over several months.
2020-10-03: I have created new municipality checklists in Brazil, Spain and Greeland, as well as created new checklists for all 66 Bird Consevation Regions (BCR) in North America. Over 13,800 new regions were added that had data available since the last update.
2020-09-01: Nineteen new species have been added to the
Nepal checklist on the basis of the official checklist of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation from 2018, in addition to a single new record of Striated Bunting found recently. I have also added synonyms of bird names in Nepali, a new addition to Avibase, and removed several species that had been added to the lists in error.
2020-08-27: Over the past month, I have added over 3.3 million distribution checklist records to Avibase. These come in part from expanding the subspecies distribution details, and the incorporation of the latest eBird EBD records dataset (about half a million records), plus the ongoing additions to our knowledge of bird distribution. The distribution database now covers over 23,000 regional checklists and contains nearly 15 million records. Among the new records are included some 147 new species records that represented firsts for a country (31 of them were due to the taxonomic rearrangement of Moltoni's Warbler).