NestWatch: An open-access, long-term data set on avian reproductive success

Long-term avian nesting data are valuable to researchers studying various aspects of avian ecology, conservation, and management. Administered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, NestWatch accepts nesting data from volunteers and professionals who agree to follow its protocol and submit data in a standardized form using either the website NestWatch.org, the mobile app, or a bulk upload template. These data (N = 574,288 nest records currently spanning 1874-2023) have been used to examine geographical and temporal variation in breeding success, clutch size, nesting phenology, and other metrics of interest to researchers. When combined with other data sets (e.g., climate, land cover, maps of environmental stressors), NestWatch data have been used to explore the large-scale effects of anthropogenic change on nesting biology. These data can also be incorporated into investigations of status and trends for declining species and can potentially be aggregated with other large-scale nest-monitoring data sets to explore hemispheric or even global change. By committing these data to the public domain, we aimed to increase their use among researchers and stimulate novel studies. The NestWatch Open Data Set by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0 (creativecommons.org); users are free to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material in any medium or format, but must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. Users may do so reasonably, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses such use, and may not use the material for commercial purposes.