BTO Garden BirdWatch

BTO Garden BirdWatch is a community-based citizen project, designed to find out how, when and why birds, mammals and other forms of wildlife use our gardens. Participants send in weekly lists of the species that they see, which are then analysed by BTO scientists to investigate the links between changes in wildlife populations and factors such as garden management, food, weather and urban structure. Data from the survey feed into the NBN Atlas and are used in analyses that are published as reports and peer-reviewed papers.

A growing number of Garden BirdWatch participants have camera traps and some feed the data from these through into their weekly garden counts. We are keen to understand how mammal reporting rates vary within the Garden BirdWatch dataset depending on the source of the observation. Are those participants using camera traps more likely to record certain mammal species, and do the camera trap data tell us more about the patterns of garden use than is possible with direct observation?

Over time, we hope that more of our participants will place their camera trap captures on MammalWeb, thereby supporting the wider aims of the project and benefitting from the MammalWeb community’s skills in validating and curating camera trap data. You can find out more about BTO Garden BirdWatch at www.bto.org/gbw and view seasonal patterns of garden use by common mammal species.