Discussions on Birdwatching

I believe that documents produced by agencies of the US government are in the public domain  -- http://www.usgs.gov/laws/info_policies.html

The SF Bay NWR data came from that site, and was produced by the USFWS and I understand is in the public domain.

Lovely. 

I can help turn copied data from websites into tables (either word or excel...can maybe even use google docs to share easily).  Have done that many times.  Doing a spot check of the lists, it looks like they all follow the same format (and really, all in HTML??? craziness).

Those are a lot of lists, though!  Where do you want to begin?

My Ornithological Society type might be helpful for you. I've filled out the Ohio Ornithological Society pretty well as an example of how the type can be used.

My Sampling campaign type might be useful for your interest in describing and linking checklists. As for whether abundance data are "more useful" or not, that really depends on the sampling protocol. For example, a 20 minute occurrence survey repeated annually at precise locations over 5 years is much more useful for inferring habitat relationships and trends than a 3 minute abundance survey over a large area that was not repeated.

It's interesting to know how data is gathered for sure, but I think that there is a lot of value in the traditional checklists.  I think your example of "3 minute survey" is a straw man, since I don't know of any that are developed that way.  

Ornithological Society is a good idea for a type... will check it out when I have a chance.

checklist_bird species with no Genus specified:

http://sfbaybirds.xtine.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/birds_without_genus 

I didn't mean to suggest checklists aren't useful. They certainly are! 

The Breeding Bird Survey is a continental scale 40+ year old program consisting of 3 minute surveys along a 24.5 mile route. Most bird surveys collected by researchers using point count protocols include a 3 minute time period (5 and 10 minutes are also commonly included.

How data are collected is of huge importance to many people. For example, an important are of research right now involves quantifying errors associated with bird species availability and detectability. These errors are often estimated using repeated counts, time of detection during the survey, and estimates of distances between the observer and the bird. Checklists are not useful for these analyses. However, checklists are very useful for documenting which species were found within a given area (over an often undocumented number surveys).

Right. Survey != Checklist.

This information is interesting, but this discussion is out of scope for this topic. I am interested in keeping this topic for data projects for this domain, and not for a general discussion on data collection / methodology.

Sorry for getting outside the scope of this topic. I guess what threw me was your comment that:

"Checklists with abundance data by month or season is more useful than checklists without abundance data.  I am currently not adding checklists that do not have abundance data. "

Unless the amount of effort placed into developing the checklist is tracked, abundance data have little, if any, more utility than occurrence data. The flipside is that occurrence data are often as useful as abundance data so you might want to add those checklists too. A boolean or enumerated property to indicate the type of checklist (i.e., abundance vs. occurrence) could be used. Also, you might want to use the written work type to store your citations rather than a text property. That will allow you to reciprocate the link with species. For example, see Nashville Warbler.

That's not the form that most checklist data that is available comes in.

 I've renamed this topic and am starting a new one for data projects.  

This discussion started in the "Checklist Abundance" topic, but the actual data projects got lost in a discussion about sampling techniques, so starting this new thread.

Things that would be useful:

• For each /biology/organism_classification object that is a checklist_bird/species, add a link to the /biology/organism_classification object that is its genus, and link genera to families /  subfamilies, and families to orders.

Here's a list of birds & their scientific_names & freebase ids that have no genus specified:

http://sfbaybirds.xtine.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/birds_without_genus

• Add more bird checklists. Checklists with abundance data by month or season is more useful than checklists without abundance data.  I am currently not adding checklists that do not have abundance data.
• Suggest new types -- Birdwatching Festivals, Tour Operators might be good types to develop.

oops. posted in the wrong spot.  anyway, feel free to comment.  i've moved the actual data discussion to the new topic  http://www.freebase.com/discuss/threads/guid/9202a8c04000641f80000000092aee2e?domain=/user/xtine/birdwatching">Data Projects in the Birdwatching Domain.

evening asked:

> OK, I'm a little confused about not using checklists that don't have abundance data.  Why not?  It doesn't look as if the Checklist type has abundance data "fields", so not sure what the issue is.

Hi, evening. Feel free to add that data if you want. I'm not adding lists without additional data though.  (It's just not that useful to me, in terms of the applications that I want to develop based on this data.)

Abundance is a property of the Checklist Bird type (a CVT that describes a bird at a particular location), and is not a property of the Checklist itself.  (I'm not actually sure what you're asking, so feel free to clarify if that does not answer your question.)

Nope that explains it.  I didn't know where the abundance property was, so that's good to know.  I guess I expected to see it in the checklist but now I realize that would probably be difficult to model.

thanks for explaining!

Great. And thanks for adding data!!  I saw you uploaded the birds from Vermont.  

You're right; it should!  I'm working on some schema changes.

Schema updated... check it out:  Golden Eagle. 

I think that is right. One thing I am not seeing is  a way to add data for non-disambiguating properties for the CVT checklist_bird_data through the UI.  (ie, How do I set the aboundance fields of a Checklist Bird Data object?)  I'll play with it more later.

Thanks!  I actually used it the other day after seeing a Red-breasted Sapsucker - felt lucky to see it when I learned it is rare in San Francisco this time of year, and is never terribly common here.

 re data. I am still resolving some bird names... so it goes.

Hi xtine. Cornell Lab of Ornithology is developing several tools to answer several of your questions based on eBird and any other data they can get their hands on. Check out this link. My hope is that Freebase will be useful for complementing the Avian Knowledge Network by providing summaries of datasets and research results.

Some of my types that may interest you include "Spatial database" and "Scholarly work - ecology". Eventually I would like "Spatial database" to map well with FGDC metadata standards but I haven't had the time to work on it yet. "Scholarly work - ecology" is the beginning of a Freebase version of my Litcentral project. For that one, I'm waiting for some closure on how citations will be stored in Freebase, which may be very soon.

 Thanks for the pointers.  I'm aware of Cornell, eBird and their great work. Good luck with your projects!

 This topic is for developing apps based using the data in this domain. 

OK - this is done.  All checklist birds should now have a species that links to a /biology/organism_classification with a valid taxon id.