Hi WILDLABS community! We want to introduce CanAvian here ahead of our lightning talk at the Variety Hour on July 29.  We would love to see you there, and this thread is a good place to keep the conversation going afterward.
 

What is CanAvian?
The Canadian Network of Avian Data (CanAvian) unites a broad community of researchers, conservation practitioners, and  volunteer scientists who generate, manage, and share extensive biodiversity data needed for ecological research. CanAvian is a collaborative initiative by Birds Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Biodiversity Pathways, and the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI). Our network connects Canada's largest biodiversity data platforms: NatureCounts (360 million records), Motus (8 billion records), and WildTrax (16 million records). Together these platforms engage over 850 organizations and 30,000 registered users from our broad community.

The challenge: Birds are one of the best-monitored animal groups, with over a century of research and citizen science behind them. But that data has historically collected in different ways, and for different purposes, and has also lived in separate systems, each built for a different purpose and each with its own standards. That makes it difficult to bring the data together for research and conservation decisions.

The approach: CanAvian is piloting building a national data space for bird data focused on collaboration, not consolidation. We don’t ask platforms to give up their identity or centralize the data elsewhere. Instead, we're aligning standards, building interoperability, and developing shared governance, so the data that already exists becomes easier to discover, trust, and use together. By aligning standards and reducing duplicated effort, we aim to keep bird data accessible, well-managed, and useful for the people who rely on it.

CanAvian is one of four projects funded through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada's (DRAC) National Data Spaces Pilot. Over a two-year window, we're formalizing data policy, technical interoperability, and governance, with an explicit commitment to FAIR and CARE principles. Bird data is our starting point, but the lessons are meant to be useful to other research communities facing the same challenge of connecting independently-built systems and datasets.

Questions I'd love this community's input on:

1. Governance:
   What has worked for you in connecting independent organizations without centralizing control?
   Do you know of any other examples of research data management tools/service providers that have created shared governance approaches or data standards to support data interoperability?
2. Technical:
   What standards, APIs, workflows, or validation tools should we be paying attention to?
   Based on your experience working with biodiversity data, what do you think are going to be some of the hurdles the CanAvian team encounters?
3. Connections: 
   Who should CanAvian be talking to? Standards groups, Indigenous data governance experts, other groups building national or regional data spaces?
   Can you see yourself as part of the CanAvian community? If so, what would that look like for you? If not, how do you think the data community in your part of the world could interact with the CanAvian data space?
    

You can learn more at canavian.ca, or explore our platforms at naturecounts.ca, motus.org, and wildtrax.ca.

Contact: Sofia Guest, CanAvian Coordinator, Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute [email protected]

Happy to answer any questions here and looking forward to comparing notes with the wider community!