Case Study: Cornell University accelerates biodiversity insights with Microsoft Azure

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

Cornell University's eBird project, a major biodiversity database, faced significant challenges in processing vast amounts of global bird observation data. Their existing compute resources were insufficient, making complex calculations labor-intensive and slow, hindering their conservation research goals. To manage their growing data needs, they turned to Microsoft and its Azure cloud platform.

By implementing Microsoft Azure, the eBird team gained access to scalable cloud computing and support for open source tools. This solution dramatically accelerated their data processing; calculations that once took weeks were completed in a matter of hours. Microsoft's technology enabled near real-time insights into bird populations, fundamentally enhancing the project's ability to inform global conservation and environmental research.

Cornell University

Amanda Rodewell

Director of Conservation Science