CanAvian is one of four recipients of National Data Spaces Pilot funding from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.
The National Data Spaces Pilot is supporting four groups in developing best practices, standards, and approaches for managing and sharing research data within their disciplines—supporting innovation, enabling responsible data use, and ensuring that Canadian research data deliver long‑term benefits for researchers and for society.
Birds are key indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem health: they can be found in all habitats and are sensitive to changes in their environment. Furthermore, they can be accurately monitored due to their visibility and ease of identification. Research and citizen science programs have been collecting data on birds for over a century, providing the largest, longest running, and most cost-effective biodiversity datasets in Canada.
Until recently, avian datasets have been housed in separate locations often in incompatible formats. Overcoming this barrier and building bridges within the community of avian data users are central goals of the CanAvian partnership.
CanAvian takes flight
CanAvian is a network of research-focused organizations who manage and deliver the largest biodiversity data platforms in Canada: NatureCounts (360 million records), Motus (8 billion records), and WildTrax (16 million records).
CanAvian is overseen by Birds Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Biodiversity Pathways, and the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI). Together these groups engage over 850 organizations and 30,000 registered users representing governments, Indigenous communities, consultants and industry, researchers and academia, non-governmental organizations, science advisory panels, educators, and community scientists.
CanAvian brings together bird data from multiple platforms under a shared banner, with the goals of making data easy to access and use and fostering collaboration and networking. These platforms were developed to meet various, unique needs (such as animal movement in Motus or acoustic monitoring in WildTrax). While each has developed internal standards, often inspired by international standards, larger integration and interoperability between platforms remains unfulfilled.
Over the next two years, this funding will enable the development of standardized formats, software services, and open access workflows. These in turn will enable efficient data collection, integration, and analysis, supporting bird research and conservation in Canada and beyond.
Biodiversity Pathways in CanAvian
Biodiversity Pathways will support the development of standards, analyses, and workflows within CanAvian:
The Boreal Avian Modelling Centre (BAM) will test the impact of improved interoperability and data availability on statistical analyses and advise on the integration of derived data products into the CanAvian data space. For over twenty years, BAM has been a leader in avian data analysis, making data-driven and model-based science and products to support bird conservation across the boreal region of North America.
SENSR will contribute to the integration of WildTrax into the CanAvian data space and interoperability between service providers. SENSR develops and implements standardized protocols for environmental sensors including ARUs, which are frequently used in bird research and monitoring.
CanAvian for Canadians
By connecting platforms, CanAvian will enable more powerful and efficient analyses, support evidence-based decision making under federal and provincial legislation, and ensure that Canadian researchers can fully leverage emerging tools in AI, machine learning, and large-scale ecological modelling.
The lessons learned by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada in growing the CanAvian network will also support the scaling up of other research data in Canada. We are honoured to be one of four pilot programs helping grow Canada’s research ecosystem.