The Federation of German Avifaunists (DDA) is the association of all national and many regional ornithological associations in Germany. It advises the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMUV), the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) and the relevant institutions of the federal states on technical issues relating to the conservation and protection of native biodiversity. Together with stakeholders in biodiversity research, the DDA carries out scientific projects; to fulfil its association's objectives, it also organizes and coordinates the nationwide monitoring of breeding and resting birds and operates the online portal ornitho.de. In total, more than 50,000 volunteers provide more than 10 million validated observation data per year for the aforementioned purposes.

The use case aims to make the DDA's extensive datasets on the distribution and abundance of bird species usable for the NFDI. This includes linking the data with other datasets, integrating them into the common NFDI infrastructure and making them more accessible to both the research community and the public.

NFDI4Biodiversity offers the ideal platform to stay informed about current developments in FAIR Data, data standards, data policy, data licenses and innovative methods of data blending and visualization. Together with partners such as the German Federation for Biological Data (GfBio e.V.), the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), we are working on the optimal use and visualization of these valuable data resources – a central contribution to the promotion of biodiversity research.

As part of the use case, two central datasets – observation lists and monitoring data – were successfully linked to the NFDI data infrastructure together with their metadata in accordance with the ABCD standard. This means that raw data from these important datasets will be published for the first time, which represents a milestone in the utilization of bird data.

• Observation lists:
  319.238 Complete observation lists from ornitho.de from the years 2011 to 2024 document the occurrence of individual bird species, such as the chaffinch. An observation list is a checklist that contains all species discovered during an observation tour in a defined period and area. This comprehensive documentation not only provides insights into observed species, but also allows conclusions to be drawn as to which species were not encountered in an area. The dataset thus provides a valuable basis for analyzing the location and distribution of observation lists in Germany.

• Monitoring of common breeding birds (MhB):
  1.17 million pinpoint observations of 99 common breeding bird species, collected on 1 km² sampling areas from 2023 and 2024, were digitally recorded and are now available as raw data. The MhB, which has been carried out since 2004 on the basis of randomly drawn sample areas from the Federal Statistical Office, provides key indicators on species diversity, sustainability and climate change. The data set provided enables researchers to analyze the raw data and develop their own applications for scientific questions.

An overview of the data is available at search.dda.gfbio.dev.

Thanks to the DDA's direct connection to the NFDI, researchers now have the opportunity to independently gain an overview of the potential of high-quality bird observations and structured monitoring programs. These data sets offer valuable approaches to answering scientific questions in the field of biodiversity and ecology.

Über die bereits genannten Beispiele hinaus gibt es zahlreiche weitere Anknüpfungspunkte im Monitoring von Brut- und Rastvogelarten. The specialist data collected can be further utilized through research collaborations in order to gain new insights and promote biodiversity research. An overview of the available monitoring programs is available on the website www.dda-web.de.

Would you like to find out more about the DDA use case? You are welcome to contact the people involved.

Use Case Manager (NFDI4Biodiversity)

For general questions about the DDA use case:

Dr. Thore Engel (thore.engel@idiv.de)

Use Case partner

For more detailed questions about the Federation of German Avifaunists (DDA):

Dr. Jakob Katzenberger (jakob.katzenberger@dda-web.de)

Dr. Tobias Erik Reiners (tobias.reiners@hgon.de)