DOC's National Banding Office
Who are we?
The National Banding Office is a small team of Department of Conservation (DOC) staff based in Wellington, responsible for coordinating the banding (also known as ringing) of birds within New Zealand and its territories.
Chatham Island oystercatcher with
colour bands, enabling researchers
to identify individual birds without
having to capture them
The role of the National Banding Office is:
- Issue banding permits
- Training banders to use bands (rings) correctly
- To collect and supply banding information
- Store information about birds that have been banded
- Arrange the design and manufacture of bands
- Supply bands and other equipment to banders
Future developments: A banding database
In 2005, the New Zealand National Bird Banding Scheme began a transformation from a paper based record keeping system to a fully digitised electronic storage system with records stored in a modern computer database. The NZ banding scheme has over 1.3 million banding records stored in a paper database. In 2005, we obtained funding from the Terrestrial and Freshwater Biodiversity Information System (TFBIS) programme to digitise all these historic records and enter them onto the Department of Conservation BIOWEB database. By September 2007, all the old banding schedule records have been entered by a team of data entry staff, and a data review and cleansing period will continue until June 2008.
Having improved access to these banding records will encourage a wide range of researchers to make better use of this large resource of bird data that is species, site and time based. Access to these records will be managed by a Banding Advisory Committee made up of representatives from the different user groups who have contributed records to the National Banding Scheme. Further details about the banding metadata and the process to get access to these records will be put on line once the database is fully assembled later in 2008.
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