Ornitho

Ornitho is a web application used to collect wildlife observation data through citizen participation. Although initially the project was thought for ornithological data, it has now expanded its capabilities and allows sharing data from the following taxonomic groups: birds, bats, terrestrial mammals, marine mammals, reptiles, amphibians, odonates, diurnal butterflies, orthopterans, orchids, cicadas, fish, crayfish, gastropods, bivalves, beetles and moths.

Ornitho is a web portal established in several European countries, which share the same technology. It started in Andorra in 2015. It has its own mobile app, called NaturaList.

The main objectives of Ornitho Andorra are the following:

• Encourage the observation of wildlife and promote its knowledge.
• Bring together the maximum naturalistic observations and the highest possible reliability.
• To be able to track species on spatial and temporal levels based on the observations introduced.
• Maintain contact with the whole community of Ornitho portals that exist in different European countries. This allows, on the one hand, to improve and expand the technical level of the application, and on the other,  to follow programs developed by other countries to take them as an example if they are of interest.

At the same time, the Ornitho portal is also part of the EuroBirdPortal project which, based on data from birds from Ornitho and other similar portals from all over Europe, manages to capture patterns of spatial and temporal distribution of some selected birds in European territory.

The contribution of data from  Ornitho has made it possible to locate some species of different taxonomic groups in many places in Andorran geography and thus expand their respective distribution maps. The table below summarizes the number of species by taxonomic group that have been recorded on the Ornitho portal.

[1] C. Pladevall, R. Caritg “ORNITHO.AD, l’aplicació digital pels amants de la natura” Revista Rastres, 2018.