Taking Flight

Twenty-six years ago, grad student Çağan Şekercioğlu needed one simple statistic for his dissertation: How many bug-eating tropical birds are threatened with extinction? Turns out, no one knew. So, he decided to find out himself.

What seemed like a quick side project evolved into BIRDBASE—a staggering dataset covering 78 traits for all 11,589 recognized bird species worldwide. It’s the first comprehensive encyclopedia of its kind.

“Thanks to my being naïve, something that started with just a little question in grad school led to the foundation of my career,” he says.

The dataset tracks everything from body mass and diet to nesting habits and migration patterns. It’s already powered 98 research papers and revealed some eye-opening patterns: 54 percent of all birds are insectivores, many facing habitat threats. Fish-eating seabirds are at high extinction risk. And in tropical forests, fruit-eating birds are the unsung heroes—dispersing seeds for over 90 percent of woody plants.

Now publicly available online, BIRDBASE will help researchers worldwide tackle some of the biggest questions in conservation biology. Şekercioğlu, now a professor in the School of Biological Sciences, estimates nearly 30 person-years of labor went into building it, with help from countless students and volunteers.

Read more about Çağan Şekercioğlu’s work.