yunfeichen/world-bird-species

World Bird Species (AviList v2026)

One record for each of 11,011 bird species, following the taxonomy of AviList v2026, the unified global checklist first published in 2025 (the IOC list has ended in its favour). The full AviList v2026 has 11,172 species; this dataset covers 45 orders and 249 families. Every species that AviList does not flag as extinct or possibly extinct is included, plus 43 flagged species that already had a sticker in this project: extinct, extinct in the wild, possibly extinct, or, for two, once extinct in the wild and since reintroduced (see extinction_status). The other 161 flagged species are left out.

This is the data half of huashu-bird-sticker, a project that also made one AI-generated sticker per species. This mirror carries only the tables, so you can load_dataset them without pulling ~700 MB of images. The stickers with their metadata are in yunfeichen/huashu-bird-sticker. Data version 2.3.1; Zenodo DOI for citation (all versions): 10.5281/zenodo.23968399.

Until November 2026 this dataset followed the IOC World Bird List v15.2 (11,064 species). crosswalk-ioc15.2-avilist2026.csv maps each IOC species to AviList, and each record's previous_ioc_ids lists the IOC IDs it replaces.

Files

File	Contents
species.csv (default config)	AviList sequence, order, family, scientific name and authority, English and Chinese names, how the species concept changed from IOC 15.2, extinction flag, eBird / Avibase / Wikidata / GBIF / iNaturalist IDs, IUCN category, sticker file path, review score, whether it meets the quality bar, and the reference used to generate the sticker
names.csv (names config)	Common names in 43 languages (46 language columns): English from AviList, Simplified Chinese as described under Coverage, the others from the IOC multilingual list. Indonesian is id-ID, because id is the species ID
species.json	The complete records, including ranges, subspecies, AVONET traits (mass, wing, tail, bill, habitat, migration, trophic niche), IUCN and CITES status
languages.json	Language codes and the IOC column each one comes from
crosswalk-ioc15.2-avilist2026.csv	How each IOC 15.2 species maps to AviList v2026
FIELDS.md	Field-by-field description of species.json, with sources and coverage (copied from the GitHub repo's data/README.md, so it also mentions files that are only in the repo, such as stickers.json)
NOTICE.md	Third-party sources and their licenses

from datasets import load_dataset
species = load_dataset("yunfeichen/world-bird-species", "species", split="train")
names = load_dataset("yunfeichen/world-bird-species", "names", split="train")

Coverage

• Names: English covers every species. Other languages are kept only where the species concept did not change from IOC 15.2; for the 129 species whose boundaries changed or that are new, an old name may refer to a different set of birds, so it was left out, except in Simplified Chinese, where each of these species was checked by hand (88 have a name, chosen from what Chinese birders use for the population in China; 41 were left empty). Simplified Chinese covers 10,947 species; French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese and Traditional Chinese over 94%. Korean, Arabic, Thai, Persian and some others cover a few hundred to about a thousand species, because that is what the IOC list has.
• IDs: Avibase 11,011 and eBird 10,983 (both from AviList); Wikidata 10,757; GBIF 10,477; iNaturalist 645.
• AVONET traits: 10,423 species. IUCN category: 10,140.

About the sticker columns

Every species has a sticker; the 91 extra stickers for subspecies are listed under forms in species.json. All stickers are AI-generated and were scored by a separate AI reviewer; meets_quality_bar is true for all of them. Scores come from a model, not an ornithologist. For a reference board, species.csv gives only its type; the images are listed in species.json. See the GitHub README for how the stickers were made.

Licenses

• Data compiled by this project: MIT.
• Taxonomy, English names, ranges, eBird and Avibase IDs, IUCN categories: AviList Core Team. 2026. AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2026. https://doi.org/10.2173/avilist.v2026, CC BY 4.0.
• Names in other languages: IOC World Bird List v15.2, Gill, Donsker & Rasmussen (Eds), CC BY 3.0.
• Traits: AVONET (Tobias et al. 2022, Ecology Letters, doi:10.1111/ele.13898), CC BY 4.0.
• Wikidata-derived fields: CC0.
• The stickers referenced by sticker_file are not in this dataset; they are under CC BY 4.0 in the GitHub repo.

Full details in NOTICE.md. Corrections welcome as issues on the GitHub repo.