Participating with your colour ring project

Participating in Submit.cr-birding.org offers a number of benefits for you as owner of a colour ring project:

1. Giving feedback to observers of birds ringed by you is done fully automatically. Time is no longer spend on reading emails of observers and adding of observations. The possibility of contacting observers is of course still available through the website.
2. A link with the BirdRing app which enables observers the possibility of adding observations of birds ringed by you to the database while in the field.
3. Easy management of ringing data and observations, including import and export functions.

To be eligible for participation, you need to be the manager and owner of a colour ring project on birds. The project has to be approved by the ringing scheme of the country in which you colour ring the birds and the cr-birding species coordinator. Information on your project should be available on cr-birding.org. You are responsible for the quality of the data submitted to Submit.cr-birding.org as well as updating the list of ringed birds. Of course the administrators of Submit.cr-birding.org can offer assistance if needed.

You can register your project for Submit.cr-birding.org by sending an email.

Data ownership

As owner of a project in CR-Birding Submit, you are and remain the owner of the birds you ringed and all observations thereof. This is recorded in a contract. Use of data from CR-Birding Submit database by others is only possible after consultation with and permission of the project owner. Observers relinquish ownership of the observations they add to the CR-Birding Submit database, which automatically transfers ownership of observations of your birds to you as project owner. Observers may of course use their own observations. Use of other observations of the same bird is only possible with the permission of the project owner. All this can be found in the disclaimer for observers.

Costs

If you own a colour ring project that you manage as a volunteer, the costs, depending on the size of the project, are at minimum €50 and at maximum €100 per year. The costs for institutes, companies and other organizations that manage a colour ring project are €500 to maximum €1500 per year. As a volunteer, there are numerous possibilities to apply for a subsidy for your project. A condition may be that you set up a working group, association or foundation. Of course, you can also share the costs with a group. Sponsoring may also be an option.

Setting up a colour ring project

Before starting a new colour ring project, a number of requirements must be met:

• You must have permission from your national ringing station to ring birds with metal rings. Coloured rings should be used as additional marking to the official rings issued by the national ringing scheme.
• You must have permission from your national ringing station to use colour rings.
• You must contact and get permission from the agreed cr-birding species coordinators for the colours and codes to be used. The species coordinator has an overview of all the combinations that have been used within the existing projects and advises which colours and codes you can use. If a project of the same species or group of species already exists, the species coordinator can propose to join this project. To prevent overlap between combinations, the advice of the species coordinator is binding.
• When you have received permission to start your colour ring project, it should be added to the European colour ring birding website cr-birding.org. For this you can contact cr-birding@skynet.be.

As owner of a colour ring project, you have the obligation to provide regular feedback to the observers of your colour ringed birds and to pass on your ringing data and observations to you national ringing scheme. CR-Birding Submit has been set up to facilitate this.

Go back