Happy World Migratory Bird Day. The 2026 theme — Every Bird Counts: Your Observations Matter — is, on the surface, a celebration of community science. The world's professional ornithology infrastructure cannot cover the geographic and temporal scale that migratory bird conservation requires. Distributed observers, trained and supported, fill the gap. The theme is recognizing that.
Read against the broader 2026 policy backdrop, though, the message lands differently. The slogan would have been true in any year. It is being chosen this year, and resonating this year, partly because the federal environmental data infrastructure that community science has historically complemented is now, in places, the infrastructure that community science is being asked to partially replace.
This is a meaningful change in what citizen science is for. We want to use the day to talk about it honestly, because the change has implications for how we do our work, and for how community members in our region can think about what their participation contributes.
What is changing
Federal environmental data infrastructure has been contracting since early 2026. The contraction is happening through several mechanisms simultaneously.
Some monitoring programs have been formally discontinued. Some have been shifted to "voluntary" or "non-mandatory" status, which in practice means uneven implementation. Some have had their data publication frequency reduced. Some agency datasets that used to be updated monthly are now being updated annually, or have moved behind agency permission requirements that effectively reduce public access.
The pattern is uneven across agencies and program types. Air quality monitoring, particularly under the AQS network, has remained largely intact at the regulatory minimum. Detailed climate monitoring under various NOAA programs has held up better than some had feared. Biodiversity monitoring, including certain U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service species programs, has seen significant contraction. Greenhouse gas monitoring, in the wake of the February endangerment finding repeal, has the most uncertain future.
The cumulative effect is that the publicly available environmental data infrastructure that researchers, journalists, state agencies, and community groups have relied on for decades is meaningfully thinner in 2026 than it was in 2024.
What community science is, and is not
Before going further, an honest accounting of what community science can and cannot do.
Community science excels at: geographically distributed observation, high-frequency local monitoring, surfacing community-relevant patterns that aggregated federal data tends to flatten, monitoring of phenomena (bird sightings, pollinator activity, neighborhood-level air pollution) where lay observers can be reliably trained, and producing data that is most directly useful at the scale at which decisions are being made.
Community science is not as well-suited for: highly technical monitoring requiring expensive specialized instruments, certain regulatory-compliance monitoring with strict legal evidentiary standards, monitoring requiring deep specialist scientific expertise, and longitudinal datasets requiring decades of methodological continuity that exceeds typical volunteer or organizational lifespans.
The traditional division of labor — federal agencies do the heavy regulatory and technical monitoring, community science fills in geographic and topical gaps the agencies cannot cover — was a reasonable allocation of strengths. As federal monitoring contracts, the division of labor changes. Community science is now being asked, in places, to carry work it was not designed for.
We need to be honest about that, both about what is possible and what is not.
What is working
A few signals from 2026 that community science is genuinely picking up real load.
The eBird platform, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, continues to produce what is widely understood as the largest dataset of bird observations in human history. Today, World Migratory Bird Day Global Big Day, will add hundreds of thousands of observations to that dataset. The platform's methodology and data quality processes have matured to the point where research peer-reviewed papers routinely cite eBird data alongside professional survey data.
PurpleAir and similar low-cost air quality sensor networks have, over the past several years, become genuine complements to the regulatory AQS network. The deployments are denser, the data is available in near-real-time, and the methodology has been validated against reference monitors in multiple peer-reviewed studies. In our own service area, our 334-node PurpleAir-based network now provides higher spatial resolution coverage than the regulatory network does.
Distributed water quality monitoring through volunteer creek watchers, riverkeeper networks, and similar programs has scaled significantly. The data is being used in regulatory contexts, in academic research, and in community advocacy at a level that would have been unusual a decade ago.
Pollinator and biodiversity monitoring through programs like Bumble Bee Watch, iNaturalist, and our own corridor network produces real, useful, decision-relevant data at scales no agency could match.
The cumulative picture is that community science infrastructure has matured significantly. Whatever the federal trajectory, the alternative infrastructure for environmental monitoring is more capable than it has been at any prior moment.
What is harder
The gaps are also real.
Community science depends on volunteer time. Volunteer time is finite. The federal monitoring work that is being shed cannot all be absorbed by community programs without somebody making decisions about which work matters most.
Community science depends on independent funding. The foundation, individual donor, and small-government grant funding that supports community science is itself under pressure. Programs that depend on a single funding source remain fragile, regardless of how good their methodology is.
Community science is unevenly distributed. The places that have well-organized community monitoring programs are not the places that need them most. The neighborhoods with the most acute environmental exposures are often the neighborhoods with the least monitoring infrastructure. Building monitoring capacity where it is most needed is its own multi-year project.
Community science cannot replace certain regulatory functions. The legal authority to enforce environmental standards rests with agencies. Better data without the authority to act on it can document a problem in increasing detail without changing it.
What we are doing about it
A few specific commitments from TerraFuture in response to the changing environment.
We are publishing more of our raw data, more quickly, with more documentation. The credibility of community-science data depends on transparency. We are over-investing in methodology documentation and quality control reporting precisely because the data is going to be relied on more heavily.
We are partnering with state agencies more deliberately. The state environmental agencies in our region are, in some cases, building out monitoring capacity to absorb work that has contracted at the federal level. Our data is useful to them. We are formalizing data-sharing agreements with three state agencies during 2026.
We are training community scientists more rigorously. The increased weight on volunteer-collected data means the training has to be better. We have invested in more in-depth observer training programs over the past year.
We are advocating for sustained funding for community-science programs at the state and foundation level. The infrastructure does not maintain itself. We are clear with our supporters about what their contributions enable.
What you can do today
It is World Migratory Bird Day. The simplest, most concrete contribution available to community members in our region right now is to spend some part of the day outside, paying careful attention, and logging what you see.
Our Audubon partners are running events at four sites this morning. The eBird platform accepts observations from any location and any observer. The Global Big Day effort accepts contributions from new birders, casual observers, and people who have been birding for forty years equally.
The single observation does not look like much. Aggregated across thousands of observers in dozens of countries, it builds a dataset that is genuinely critical infrastructure for migratory bird conservation. Every Bird Counts is the theme. It is also the methodology.
We will see you out there.
