The Aranzadi bird Ringing Scheme data bank.

Abstract

The Aranzadi Ringing Scheme (ARS), operated by the Aranzadi Sciences Society, is an official bird-ringing program in Spain. Established in 1949, the data bank of the ARS is published, with the data aggregated to some extent, in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). It is a dataset covering the period from 1950 to nowadays, although ringings-but not recoveries-up to the 1970s remain, in part, to be digitalized. Ringings are carried out in Spain, and only exceptionally in third countries where there is not an official, operative ringing scheme. Recoveries of birds with Aranzadi rings can be potentially collected elsewhere; currently, recoveries of birds have been on all the continents-but not in Oceania and on Antarctica-with in the bounding coordinates of 59.0°N to 33.8°S and 62.8°E to 33.8°W, but > 90% of the records are within Europe. Up to 31 December 2024, the dataset includes 1.8 million records of either ringings or recoveries, all of which are georeferenced. In total 479 taxa are included, of which 430 are species. The rest are subspecies, hybrids, or birds identified only to genus. Twenty-four orders are represented by the data.