This data set contains distribution information for all birds occurring in the Western Hemisphere. The goal of this project is to make this distributional information freely available to the public to inform conservation and other landuse decisions. A Memorandum of Understanding signed by NatureServe (then known as the Association for Biodiversity Information), The Nature Conservancy/Migratory Bird Program, Conservation International/CABS, World Wildlife Fund-US, and in 2000, with the subsequent addition of Environment Canada, governed the initial development and guidelines for sharing of these data. The MOU expired in 2003, but NatureServe, the compiler of the data set, continues to maintain the data largely in the spirit of the original [...]