Historical breeding bird data from a national citizen science nest box monitoring initiative in the Netherlands, 1922–1950

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 40,721 records.

1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Burant J B, Oosterkamp W E, Thapa P, van Hofslot T, Visser M E, Vriend S J G (2025). Historical breeding bird data from a national citizen science nest box monitoring initiative in the Netherlands, 1922–1950. Version 1.1. The Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). Occurrence dataset. https://ipt.nlbif.nl/resource?r=nestkast_1&v=1.1

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is The Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has not been registered with GBIF

Keywords

birds presence; breeding birds; ecology; phenology; nest site; history; nest succes; long term ecological monitoring; Occurrence

Contacts

Geographic Coverage

The Netherlands in the early twentieth century

Taxonomic Coverage

The data include 105 bird species, with 90.5 percent of all records belonging to nine species.

Temporal Coverage

Project Data

No Description available

The personnel involved in the project:

Sampling Methods

Volunteers checked nests in nestboxes and a small number of wild nests. They recorded lay date, clutch size and brood size. These data were gathered into a physical dataset by the Plantenziektekundige Dienst.

Method step description:

1. Source files were scanned and digitized using the pre-trained Transkribus model 'The Text Titan I' for text recognition, the 'Universal Lines' model for layout recognition, and a machine learning model trained on 80 manually transcribed pages for table recognition. The raw text output was cleaned with manual review and automation using Python with pandas and regex libraries.
2. Datafication included standardizing area and observer names. Location names were manually geographically coded using historical Esri maps of the Netherlands. Species taxonomy was mapped to the vernacular names using the taxize package in R. Lay dates were recorded as integers, through inference we assumed that all lay dates were recorded as April dates (with April 1 = 1 and March 31 = 0) unless specified otherwise. These dates were reformatted to ISO 8601 and used as eventDate.
3. Quality control included reviewing suspicious values (e.g. outliers, improbable and impossible values) against the source material. The data was further validated against the original reports from the Plantenziektekundige Dienst.

Additional Metadata