The research, led by Samuel T. Iniunam of the A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute, documents a dramatic shift in who contributes bird records in Nigeria. Before structured training programs began, indigenous birders were largely absent from national databases. After training, their participation surged.

The study documents the history of birding in Nigeria, from the colonial era to the present. It shows how the Nigerian Ornithologists’ Society, founded in the colonial period, was dominated by expatriates for decades. The society’s membership only began to diversify after the A. P. Leventis Institute began training programs.

The training programs combined classroom instruction with field experience. Participants learned bird identification, survey methods, and data recording. The programs also provided equipment, removing a major barrier to participation.

The results show a dramatic increase in indigenous participation after training. Before training, indigenous birders were largely absent from national databases. After training, their participation surged, with many becoming active contributors to conservation.

The study also documents the barriers that historically kept indigenous people out of birding. These included lack of equipment, lack of training, and the dominance of expatriates in ornithological societies. The training programs addressed each of these barriers directly.

The research has implications for conservation across the tropical world. It shows how structured training can open the door to indigenous participation in birding and conservation. The approach could be replicated in other countries where indigenous people are underrepresented in ornithology.

The study is a landmark in the history of birding in Nigeria. It documents how structured training can transform who participates in birding and conservation. The approach offers a model for other tropical countries seeking to diversify participation in ornithology.

The study draws on more than two decades of records from eBird, the global checklist platform launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society in 2002, alongside data from the Nigerian Bird Atlas Project, known as NiBAP, which was established in 2015 with support from Swedish and South African partners. By comparing checklist submission rates before and after participation in the Introductory Ornithology Field Course, the researchers were able to quantify how formal training translated into sustained data collection behavior. This before-and-after design is important because it moves beyond anecdote, offering measurable evidence that capacity building changes who contributes to biodiversity databases and how often they do so.

Nigeria provides an instructive setting for this work. The country spans roughly 923,769 square kilometers and holds a human population exceeding 230 million people, distributed across coastal, savanna, and arid ecological zones. Its avifauna is correspondingly rich, with authoritative checklists such as that of the African Bird Club recognizing 921 species, while citizen science platforms report between 760 and 880 species depending on the dataset consulted. This gap between documented and platform-recorded diversity itself illustrates the under-sampling problem that broader local participation could help address. In a nation where demographic expansion and dependence on natural resources place considerable pressure on biodiversity, mobilizing residents as monitors offers a pragmatic route to conservation data at scale.

The historical context the researchers document helps explain why participation was so skewed for so long. Ornithology in Nigeria took shape during the colonial era and remained dominated by expatriate researchers for decades afterward. The Nigerian Ornithological Society, founded in February 1964, initially consisted mainly of European ornithologists working in British West Africa. In 1977 it expanded into the West African Ornithological Society to incorporate francophone colleagues from former French colonies, yet African representation in governance stayed minimal for a remarkably long time. The first indigenous council member joined only in 2000, and the council today comprises six Africans and four Europeans, a balance that signals genuine but recent change. Professional capacity followed a similarly slow trajectory. When the A. P. Leventis Ornithological Research Institute opened in 2001, fewer than five Nigerian ornithologists held PhDs, and no formal training programs or dedicated institutions had previously existed.

Against this backdrop, the scale of informal birding activity before 2015 appears strikingly small. Birdwatching in Nigeria was then confined to a community of fewer than 200 active participants, operating largely under the Lekki and Ibadan Bird Clubs, which the Nigerian Conservation Foundation had established in 2009 and 2014 respectively. The researchers frame this scarcity not as a failure of interest but as a consequence of missing infrastructure: accessible training pathways, mentorship, and peer networks that in Europe and North America had accumulated over more than a century of recreational natural history and volunteer-based monitoring schemes.

The theoretical framing of the study draws on participation-based frameworks including social learning theory, communities of practice, and diffusion of innovations. These perspectives hold that sustained involvement in citizen science depends not merely on individual motivation but on access to skills, mentorship, and social networks that allow newcomers to learn experientially and integrate into scientific practice. NiBAP’s strategy operationalized this insight through two complementary mechanisms. Formal training came through workshops and field courses that built technical proficiency in identification and survey methods. Informal training came through the deliberate establishment of bird clubs that paired trained ornithologists with amateur birdwatchers and nature enthusiasts, enabling knowledge transfer through everyday social interaction and cultivating communities of practice that could sustain engagement long after formal instruction ended.

The quantitative results lend strong support to this model. Checklist submission rates rose markedly among participants after completing the field course, and comparisons of eBird contributions from 2000 to 2024 show a clear divergence between indigenous and expatriate contributor trajectories, with indigenous participation climbing substantially once capacity building took hold. Questionnaire responses from NiBAP volunteers add a qualitative layer, revealing both the motivations that draw people into birding and the barriers that had previously kept them out, from limited awareness of citizen science to the absence of equipment and social entry points.

The study also points to a regional benchmark for what sustained investment can achieve. The Southern African Bird Atlas Project, launched in 2007, cultivated a substantial volunteer community producing fine-scale bird distribution data across a diverse landscape, demonstrating that citizen science at national scale is attainable in the global South when training and community development receive long-term support. Nigeria’s experience suggests a transferable sequence: build professional capacity first, embed it in institutions, then use those institutions to train and mentor volunteer networks that feed standardized data into global platforms.

For the wider field of biodiversity monitoring, the implications extend beyond ornithology. Citizen science datasets increasingly underpin species distribution models, conservation planning, and international reporting, yet their coverage remains uneven and often weakest precisely where biodiversity is richest. If the barriers documented in Nigeria, including limited expertise, low awareness, and weak knowledge-exchange infrastructure, are common across developing countries, then the capacity-building framework tested here offers a scalable template. The finding that community-driven training and inclusive outreach can lower entry barriers while producing measurable gains in technical proficiency and sustained engagement suggests that broadening participation is not only an equity goal but a practical strategy for improving the quality and completeness of the ecological record in the tropics.

Subject of Research: Indigenous participation in tropical birding

Article Title: Capacity building as a pathway to indigenous participation in tropical birding and citizen science

Article References: Ivande, S. T., Abalaka, J. I., Atuo, F. A., Barshep, Y., Chaskda, A. A., Dami, F. D., Danmallam, B. A., Egbe, S. W., Iniunam, I. A., Iwajomo, S. B., Kumdet, P. S., Kazeh, N. W., Manu, S. A., Onoja, J. D., Ringim, A. S., Tende, T., & Ottosson, U. (2026). Capacity building as a pathway to indigenous participation in tropical birding and citizen science. Frontiers in Bird Science, 5, Article 1797647. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbirs.2026.1797647

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbirs.2026.1797647

Keywords: birding, conservation, Nigeria, indigenous participation, tropical ornithology, Capacity, building, pathway, indigenous, participation, tropical, citizen