The BMDE is a standardized data schema that promotes the sharing and analysis of biodiversity observation data. It is essentially a standard set of fields (like the columns in a spreadsheet) that capture the details of an observation. It was developed for birds, but is also well suited to describing observations of other taxa, such as butterflies and amphibians. Every dataset downloaded from NatureCounts is formatted using the BMDE.

Photo by Kris Cu

The BMDE is based on the Darwin Core, a similar schema developed for sharing information about organisms in natural history collections like museums and zoos. Using Darwin Core allows bird monitoring data to be integrated with other initiatives such as GBIF. 

It is important to know that the BMDE is not meant to describe all data fields of every bird monitoring dataset, but to allow sharing of bird observation information. Some types of datasets would require additional field extensions in order to capture them in their entirety. For example, there are currently extensions for bird banding data and nest monitoring data.

Next section: Why do we use the BMDE?