The spotting of subtropical birds dozens of miles north of where they traditionally have been seen is the inspiration behind an online bird observatory that went live Monday. The effort is designed to help researchers better understand climate change.

CONE-Welder -- short for the Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments at the Welder Wildlife Refuge in South Texas -- involves the use of a tele-robotic camera that anyone can access via the Web to help the Smithsonian Institute researchers track birds. Participants can take pictures of birds and comment on them. What's more, they can make a game of it, competing with others for such honors as the Daily Night Owl Award for the last picture of the day and the Daily Parrot Award for best comment of the day.

The goal of the project is described as being "to determine if the sightings are representative of rapid and recent changes in breeding range or the result of normal bird vagrancy and dispersal."

Online observers are being supplemented with researchers who are on-site at the wildlife refuge, which is home to one of the highest number of bird species in North America. Some of the latest observations can be found at the Networked Bird Observatory Blog.

In addition to Welder and the Smithsonian, the University of California at Berkeley, Texas A&M and the National Science Foundation are involved in the project.

Calling the effort to our attention was Ken Goldberg, a professor at UC Berkeley who recently discussed the school's Jester joke-recommendation system with us.

We wrote last year about a smaller but similar online bird-observatory project dubbed CONE Sutro Forest that focused on birds in San Francisco.

Read more about network research at our Alpha Doggs blog.