By the on-line Atlas the Centro Ornitologico Toscano (Tuscan Ornithological Center) aims to make available all the information on the distribution of the birds of Tuscany stored in its archives.

By selecting, on the page “maps”, the name of a particular species from the menu, a distribution map, including data collected since 1st January 1995 by the COT, will be produced. It is also possible to get further information by selecting the observations month by month, or according to the monitoring project by means of which they have been collected.

It is not possible to highlight observations not officially communicated to the COT or not collected during one of the several projects of the association.

Our map can not, and do not want, give an exhaustive representation of the monthly distribution of birds in Tuscany, but only provide an updated information, on the basis of our data, to everyone who is interested.

At the same time we hope that the maps will stimulate everybody owning data on the distribution of birds in Tuscany, to send their data to the COT and contribute to make our maps more and more detailed. In order to achieve this aim, the software - Cronaca - for entering and storing ornithological observations is actually freely downloadable at the COT web site. This programme should be used in combination with the electronic atlas of Tuscany (scale 1:10.000) that can be requested at segreteria@centrornitologicotoscano.org. We are also about to set up, in the near future, the on-line submission of the ornithological observations.

Distribution maps allow to show the content of the COT data banks (Banche Dati ), which organizes four monitoring schemes:

Cronaca - includes the observations collected by the COT members and affiliates during their excursions and during the fieldwork carried out for local or short-term COT projects.

MITO - includes observations on breeding birds collected since 2000 in the period 15 May-15 June.

CUA - is the monitoring program of the wintering waterbirds, carried out every year in January since 1984 in all the wetlands of Tuscany.

MUNTO - is the owls monitoring scheme of Tuscany started since 2004 in a series of sampled areas of the region.

Beside the distributions shown in the maps our archives include further information such as: exact location, number of individuals, activity and ascertain degree of breeding. In addition some of the points shown on the maps represent a synthesis of several different observations. Data from the archives “MITO” and “cronaca” are in fact shown in a simplified way, grouping different observations coming from the same 1Km x 1Km cell of the UTM grid. In a similar way data from the archive CUA, represent a synthesis of the presences in January of the birds in the wetland monitored during the winter censuses, and points on the maps correspond to the centroid of the wetland.