Screencap video illustrating steps to download frequency of occurrence data on checklists submitted to eBird. In this example, birds reported June–July, 2009–2018, are summarized for Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA. I then organize and subsample those data in a Microsoft Excel workbook, sorting them by frequency of occurrence. Once these steps are completed, the data are ready for comparisons among other areas, times, etc.
Data like these can be used for comparisons of species richness including alpha, beta, and gamma diversity and the Bird Community Index. Frequency of occurrence is an estimate of encounter rate, but it can be used as a stand-in for relative abundance in calculation of Shannon diversity and community similarity indices. Just be careful to make that clear in presentation and do NOT compare to analysis that includes actual abundance (i.e., literal number of individuals) estimates.
The good folks at eBird can help you with larger and more complicated downloads, as well as advice on how the data should and shouldn't be used: https://ebird.org/data/download.
