Case Study: Cornell University achieves near-real-time biodiversity insights and cuts analysis from weeks to hours with Microsoft Azure

Cornell’s eBird delivers insights from biodiversity data with Microsoft’s cloud

Cornell University’s eBird project, operated by the Lab of Ornithology, aggregates global bird-observation data to inform conservation research and policy. As the database swelled—more than 325 million records and about 10 million new records each month—processing those large, continuous data streams became slow and costly, with key analyses taking days or even 2–3 weeks on existing compute resources.

By moving to Microsoft Azure and leveraging open-source tools like Hadoop, Linux, and R, eBird gained scalable cloud compute that integrated with its existing systems. Calculations that formerly took weeks now run in hours, enabling near–real-time insights into bird abundance and distribution and directly supporting conservation initiatives and scientific decision-making.

Cornell University

Amanda Rodewell

Director of Conservation Science