STTR Phase II: Location-based PDA Bird Field Guide

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project will develop and test an electronic field guide for North America that will facilitate bird identification in the field combining images, audio, geographic information, and descriptive data. The system will include 1000 birds of North America, uniquely presented audio content, expanded GIS features, support for Windows CE devices, and the wireless transfer of data. The highlights of this software are the mobility offered by the PDA, database searches to aid species identification, access to multimedia and GIS data in the field. The proposed software will provide significant benefits to the education and research communities by allowing multiple PDA users to upload their observations to CLOs (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) eBird server (www.ebird.org) via desktop software or wireless Internet connection. The availability of PDA-based software for use by students will facilitate student learning and enable students to play a key role in data collection for national and international research projects. The availability of this software to birders and amateur naturalist will promote citizen participation in science and conservation. The data collection and GPS features of the system will help researchers to accurately record scientifically useful data. The portable data collection and data transfer features will facilitate the gathering of data and timely reporting of that data to researchers.