Those who use eBird have frequently expressed interest in having hotspot locations defined by a polygon. While I was creating pages in the Ohio eBird Hotspot website to describe the Audubon Important Bird Areas (IBA), I have realized that in Ohio there are already 70 IBA areas defined by polygons!
Check the index page for a list of all the IBAs in Ohio:
Ohio Important Bird Areas
The only place in the eBird website where I can find reference to the IBA polygons is in Explore Data –> Bar Charts. One of the options is to create a bar chart for each IBA area. I believe these bar charts pick up data from both hotspots and personal locations within the polygon which defines the IBA, but I am not absolutely sure about the personal locations.
On each IBA page, I have created a bar chart table where you can select a bar chart of the IBA for all months, a season, or a single month. This is much less cumbersome than creating the bar chart from the eBird website.
I have also listed all the eBird hotspots within the IBA. If you are familiar with an IBA area you might help me by letting me know if I have missed hotspots which should be listed.
This project gives you an example of how polygons might work in eBird in the future. The IBA polygons are not set up to receive checklist data directly. But when you submit data to a hotspot or personal location in the polygon area the data is added to the bar chart.