Five Years, 135 Blocks

We at the Yolo Audubon Society are planning to start a breeding bird atlas project for Yolo County, commencing in 2008. A breeding bird atlas is a set of maps that show the distribution of where every bird species nests, in this case in a set of grid cells across a single county. A breeding bird atlas project takes place over several years, often five — the idea is to confirm the breeding status of each species across the entire time period. A standard grid cell size is 5 × 5 kilometers, which works out to about 135 grid cells across the county. At about 15-20 hours of effort per grid cell, we will have our work cut out for us!