Oschadleus HD. 2014. PHOtos of Weaver Nests. Why PHOWN? Ornithological Observations 5:457-461.

Introduction. PHOWN (PHOtos of Weaver Nests) is a Virtual Museum, citizen science project of the Animal Demography Unit, to collect and monitor breeding distributions and colony sizes of weaver birds globally. It began in mid-2010 (Oschadleus and Underhill 2013) and has collected over 11 000 records in four years.

This paper introduces the subject of the value of the PHOWN project, and this article will be followed by a series of papers presenting different results from PHOWN. The paper lists difference between the Nest Record Card (NRC) scheme and PHOWN, highlighting the much larger number of annual records in PHOWN. The 2 projects also differ in that PHOWN (and the other ADU Virtual Museum projects have a visual component. This could allow unique applications, for instance obtaining relative entrance tube lengths of Spectacled Weaver nests (see paper for example photos).