discussion / Citizen Science  / 23 May 2025

A crazy new feature on eBird - Uploading media at the list level

Calling all birders!

Not sure if you’ve noticed, but eBird has recently added a crazy new feature: you can now upload media, like photos and audio recordings at the checklist level! 

I’m excited to try this out because it could really transform how we study landscape ecology on a bigger scale!

Has anyone given it a go yet? 




My first thought was that these were bird photos and eBird would automatically populate your checklist, but now I see these are habitat photos! That is very cool ... eBiome! From the website:

Habitat photos hold tremendous promise for improving bird occurrence models and understanding long-term changes to habitat conditions. We encourage users to document habitats during their visits and continue tracking changes over time. Tagging observed species in habitat photos may help reveal important connections between birds and their environments. These can also offer finer-scale insights that improve our approaches to assessing habitats, which currently relies on satellite imagery.

Soundscape recordings hold similar promise, capturing the broader soundscape of a site and how it may change. They will also play a key role in training Merlin Sound ID to recognize individual species within busy dawn choruses and environmental recordings.