About ChirpScout
ChirpScout began with a simple question: can we combine real weather data, geospatial analysis, and the world's largest bird observation database to help people find better birding? Five years and 146,000 observations later, that question has a rigorous, data-grounded answer — and it's pointing toward something larger.
We are currently an active research project working toward the formation of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
What We Do
ChirpScout synthesizes signals that no single source captures alone. Location quality, weather conditions, and the collective knowledge of millions of citizen science observers each tell part of the story. We bring them together into a recommendation a birder can actually use.
Our Mission
To use geospatial analytics, meteorological science, and citizen science to help people engage more deeply with the natural world — and to direct that same rigor toward the conservation of the habitats that wildlife depends on.
We believe that helping someone have an exceptional morning at a local nature preserve is not separate from conservation work — it is conservation work. The birders, hikers, and nature enthusiasts who use tools like ChirpScout become the constituency that fights to protect the places they visit.
Better data leads to better experiences. Better experiences build deeper attachment. Deeper attachment protects land.
Where We Are Now
ChirpScout's five-year migration study across three North Carolina sites is the foundation of everything we're building. The findings — including a validated weather-to-activity scoring model, a 2.9–3.7× hotspot productivity multiplier, and a publicly accessible Activity Validator — represent the first published empirical validation of a consumer birding app's prediction model against a longitudinal observation dataset.
That research is the basis for our white paper and the foundation of our institutional partnership work with organizations including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Carolina Bird Club.
Coming NextWe are working toward 501(c)(3) formation as a conservation technology non-profit — with a donor-supported model that keeps the app free and the data open. Future work will expand the study to additional regions and species groups, deepen the environmental habitat layer, and develop partnerships with land trusts and conservation organizations to put ChirpScout's geospatial tools in service of habitat protection decisions.
If you're a researcher, institution, or funder interested in what we're building, we'd be glad to hear from you.
Researchers, institutions, funders, and birders are all welcome.