What kinds of birds do you find especially amazing? Let us know, and take part in a citizen science project

A new project by the Finnish Natural History Museum at the University of Helsinki lets you rate bird species by their appearance. Try the online app and tell us which birds you find the most beautiful.

In the new online citizen science project , you can rate birds from 1–10 to let us know how fantastic you find different kinds of bird species. The app has all the birds in the world, and the dataset collected from people’s ratings can be used in many types of research. The data can help us understand what it is in the appearance of a bird species that makes it especially attractive to people, or whether the bird’s appearance impacts its susceptibility to be used in legal or illegal trade.

“The app was designed to be easy to use, and it works on both mobile and desktop browsers. We hope many people will participate in the data collection,” says researcher Anna Haukka from the Finnish Natural History Museum.

The minimum time to participate is only a minute, but if you get enthusiastic about it, you can rate the appearance of up to thousands of birds. The photographs are kindly offered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library database, which has photos of nearly all the over 10,000 bird species in the world. By taking part in the project, you will also learn about the huge variety of birds that exist worldwide.

The app and citizen science project are part of research that investigates which factors influence the bird trade globally. The collected data helps evaluate which species are more likely to be under threat from unsustainable trade in the future. The is now open for use all over the world. The collection of the dataset is coordinated by the .

More information

  • Researcher Anna Haukka, The Finnish Natural History Museum,
  • Curator Aleksi Lehikoinen, The Finnish Natural History Museum, , +358 45 1375732