Birds captivate our attention. Some stun us with their beauty, others with their jaw-dropping courtship displays. Their songs bring joy to dawn and their feats of flight astound us. We share the planet with feathered creatures who signal trouble ahead and, all at once, reveal incredible resilience to change. Our fascination with their richness, their diverse ways of living, and our concern that they prosper despite human influence on our shared environment drive scientific studies of birds.

Frontiers in Bird Science publishes high-quality scientific studies of birds, whether the birds are wild, captive, or domesticated, and makes those studies instantly available to everyone through Gold Open Access.

Led by Field Chief Editor W. Douglas Robinson from Oregon State University, the journal contains traditional specialty sections, such as Ecology and Behavior, Conservation and Management, and others. It also includes sections focused on new opportunities to transform our understanding of birds with technological innovation, such as the burgeoning study of avian Movements and Migration facilitated by tracking technology and the comparatively new culture of promoting synthetic studies from movement data shared in public databases.

The unique public appeal of birds will be elevated by openly and rapidly sharing rigorous scientific studies of birds. Indeed, many important discoveries about birds currently (and no doubt increasingly in the future) arise from observations collected and contributed by bird enthusiasts. Ornithology has a long and rich history of amateur contributions to scientific discovery. The rapidly increasing importance of online databases filled with hundreds of millions of bird observations across the globe pose enormous opportunities to improve our understanding of birds, as well as the people who love them. The collaboration between scientists and enthusiasts promises to be fruitful for a very long time indeed. Given this opportunity, Frontiers in Bird Science includes a specialty section on the Science of Birding, where analyses of community science data, exploration of the human dimensions of bird study, and even investigations of opportunities to improve the accuracy and reliability of public contributions of data are encouraged.

The journal aligns with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15: Life on Land, with a particular focus on protecting and promoting the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems crucial for bird habitats. This includes efforts to manage forests sustainably, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and biodiversity loss, all of which are essential for the conservation of bird species and their ecosystems.

We expect Frontiers in Bird Science to be innovative and comprehensive. The public attends to wild birds to such a degree that society often prioritizes their conservation and management above the protection of many other organisms. Yet our understanding of the fundamental biology of birds, foundational to the protection of wild populations, stands firmly on a long history of detailed scientific studies of captive and domesticated birds. Thus, all high-quality studies of birds may find a home here.

Grand challenges at the frontiers of bird science