Updated checklist of birds in Heilongjiang Province in 2025

Records were included if the species identification was confirmed; however, if the photographs were determined to represent misidentifications of species already recorded in Heilongjiang Province, they were not considered new provincial records. Newly added records from the eBird platform were verified using the same procedure of manual identification based on photographic evidence.The taxonomic system and English species names followed the AviList: The Global Avian Checklist, v2025.

Chinese species names and zoogeographical information were based on the A Checklist on the Classification and Distribution of the Birds of China (4th edition). The checklist was comprehensively revised based on the previous studies Preliminary revision of the avifauna of Heilongjiang Province and The Avifauna of Heilongjiang. The final dataset was exported in Excel format.The dataset consists of three tables: Supplementary Material 1—Updated checklist of birds of Heilongjiang Province (AviList v2025), Supplementary Material 2—Summary of checklist revisions, and Supplementary Material 3—Newly recorded bird species and their data sources in Heilongjiang Province.

The column labels include “Order”, “Family”, “No.”, “Scientific name”, “Chinese name”, “English name”, “Subspecies name”, “IUCN”, “Fauna”, “Residence type”, “Provincial new species”, “Source of new species”, “Detail of revision”, “Original name in The Avifauna of Heilongjiang”, and “Original name in the 2016 revision”.

Among these fields, “Provincial new species” and “Source of new species” are used to record newly added distribution records identified during this revision, while “Detail of revision” describes the taxonomic or distributional changes of each species compared with Preliminary revision of the avifauna of Heilongjiang Province.Supplementary Material 1 represents the complete updated checklist and contains 414 species records.

Supplementary Material 2 contains 103 records of taxonomic or distributional changes. The “No.” column in Supplementary Material 2 refers to the original species number assigned in The Avifauna of Heilongjiang; if this column is blank, the species was newly added in the revised checklist. Supplementary Material 3 contains information on 32 newly recorded species and their corresponding data sources.Potential sources of uncertainty mainly include inaccurate species identification in public observations and uncertainty caused by insufficient photographic evidence.

To reduce these uncertainties, newly added records were verified through manual examination of photographs and comparisons among multiple data sources. As public citizen-science data rely on voluntary submissions from observers, this dataset mainly represents currently available and verified bird distribution records. Additional distribution records may emerge in the future with increased surveys and observation efforts.