Data Standards
Two data standards underpin all data in NatureCounts, helping to make the data as accessible and usable as possible. The Dataset Metadata ensures that all data are accompanied by relevant information that allow them to be used effectively. The Bird Monitoring Data Exchange (BMDE) provides a standard format for all data in NatureCounts, allowing different datasets to be used and analyzed together.
Dataset Metadata
Metadata describes when, where, how, and by whom the data were collected. This information must accompany any dataset contributed to NatureCounts. If you use data from NatureCounts, it is essential that you read the metadata associated with each dataset.
Metadata provides information on how to interpret codes used by different datasets, as well as details about location precision, who to acknowledge for use of the data, sampling approach, considerations for analysis and more.
Before contributing data to NatureCounts, we ask all data owners to complete a metadata questionnaire. You can view the questionnaire and a completed sample at the link below.
Bird Monitoring Data Exchange (BMDE)
The BMDE format is a standardized way of formatting biodiversity occurrence data that promotes sharing and analysis. It is essentially a standard set of fields (like the columns in a spreadsheet) that capture the details of an observation. It was developed for birds, but is also well suited to describing observations of other taxa, such as butterflies and amphibians.
The BMDE includes 169 core fields that capture the various aspects of a bird observation. It is based on the Darwin Core, a similar schema developed for sharing information about organisms in natural history collections like museums and zoos. Using Darwin Core allows bird monitoring data to be integrated with other initiatives such as GBIF.
The BMDE was extended in 2018 to 265 fields, though most datasets available on NatureCounts only use the core version. A few extensions have been defined, such as the bird banding data and nest records extensions.
The BMDE is not meant to describe all data fields of every bird monitoring dataset, but to allow sharing of bird observation information. Some types of datasets would require additional field extensions in order to capture them in their entirety.
See the BMDE Fields page to view the fields included in the various versions and extensions of the BMDE, and the Getting Started With the BMDE tutorial to learn more about the data schema.