eBird is a collective enterprise that takes a novel approach to citizen science by developing cooperative partnerships among experts in a wide range of fields: population ecologists, conservation biologists, quantitative ecologists, statisticians, computer scientists, GIS and informatics specialists, application developers, and data administrators. Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology eBird’s goal is to increase data quantity through participant recruitment and engagement globally, but also to quantify and control for data quality issues such as observer variability, imperfect detection of species, and both spatial and temporal bias in data collection. eBird data are openly available and used by a broad spectrum of students, teachers, scientists, NGOs, government agencies, land managers, and policy makers. The result is that eBird has become a major source of biodiversity data, increasing our knowledge of the dynamics of species distributions, and having a direct impact on the conservation of birds and their habitats.