"eBird data document bird distribution, abundance, habitat use, and trends through checklist data collected within a simple, scientific framework. Birders enter when, where, and how they went birding, and then fill out a checklist of all the birds seen and heard during the outing."
I like it when I see these crowdsourced science projects, because so much of modern science is done inside of organizations which seek only to find newly patentable things.