Worldwide bird watchers could hope to spend Valentine's Day weekend along with the birds, making a contribution to the Great Backyard Bird Count.

Citizen science movements are growing across the globe, as communities have been developing their amateur interest in galaxies, frogs or in birds in this case for providing data that can't be uncovered by any single scholar or even study research team.

In a phone interview, Pat Leonard of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who coordinates the 2016 Great Backyard Bird Count, said that's the sole way to keep track of things that are very widespread. It all became possible because of the Internet.

The bird counts, which started with the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count about 100 years back, are among the oldest and best citizen science examples. The bird count last year drew an estimated 144,000 ornithology enthusiasts from over 100 countries. The promotion of the 2016 event, which will be running from February 13 to February 15, suggested that this year may be record-breaking and will make a major contribution to the body of knowledge about birds.

Ms. Leonard said that data sets for birds are possibly among the complete possessed by them because people have been seeing for so long.

With the help of bird count data, researchers can't just track the numbers, but can also keep a record of the movement of a species. For instance, the Eurasian collared dove is a dove species that started shifting into North America from the Bahamas in 1982.

Leonard said that because of bird count data, researchers may track the species as it moved northward via the contiguous United States and ultimately into Alaska. For the present, the monitoring has also allayed fears that the bird could harm native dove species.