RE: [cayugabirds-l] ebird reporting question re: motion activated photos

2020-05-13 Thread Magnus Fiskesjo 

Applause! đź‘Źđź‘Ź

Well said!

I too would love to see those “camera trap” photos and would support their 
inclusion in eBird.

Magnus Fiskesjö, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University
McGraw Hall, Room 201. Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
E-mail: magnus.fiske...@cornell.edu, or: n...@cornell.edu
 

From: bounce-124628501-84019...@list.cornell.edu 
[bounce-124628501-84019...@list.cornell.edu] on behalf of Dave Nutter 
[nutter.d...@mac.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 10:23 AM
To: CAYUGABIRDS-L
Subject: Re: [cayugabirds-l] ebird reporting question re: motion activated 
photos

Some thoughts about eBird & non-standard reports: EBird has more than one 
purpose.

Certainly ornithologists want usable data, and that means lots of reports made 
in the same way. That’s why eBird promotes “complete” checklists of a certain 
length and time, which can be thrown in the same pile for statistical purposes. 
Reports which don’t meet those standards must be easily separated by how they 
are labeled. But that doesn’t mean they should not be in eBird at all. Perhaps 
the query about reports long after they were submitted was to find out whether 
they were usable for a particular study.

The reason eBird can collect enough data to use for statistical purposes is 
because birders find the program useful and fun. Promoting awareness of birds 
and conservation issues, which I hope includes birding, are functions the Lab 
of O and eBird program. To me as a birder, eBird is great for a couple of 
reasons.

First, I can keep track of what I’ve observed and include all my obscure and 
excruciating notes and terrible photos (See if you can make use of *that*, 
Merlin!). And my lists are not all statistically usable data for many 
ornithological purposes. I have modified my birding to try to help the 
ornithologists with standard complete lists, but when I find an interesting 
bird even though I wasn’t doing a formal timed birding session, I try to do an 
“incidental” eBird report.

Second, I can find out what other people have found, including their notes, 
photos, & audio. To me this is interesting and satisfying whether or not I want 
to chase it. Especially for species which I have seen before, I can enjoy 
someone else’s photo instead of burning gasoline and destroying the climate by 
chasing it. When Dave Kennedy makes a local trip to Montezuma and puts his 
fantastic photos in eBird, I have *less* need to drive 100miles. I would love 
to see “camera trap” photos and would support their inclusion in eBird. That’s 
how we learned that a Crested Caracara showed up to feed on carrion in Wayne 
County in 2018. I enjoy the audio from night flight calls (NFCs), even though 
my hearing isn’t good enough to detect them. I use eBird to find out what has 
been found in the Cayuga Lake Basin. I use eBird to learn about the ranges of 
“our” species when they are not here. I use eBird to learn about species I will 
never personally see because I expect never to fly again, and even trips more 
than a couple counties away (let alone south Texas!) have huge questions now. 
My birding this spring has been almost exclusively where I walk and bike, but 
eBird and CayugaBirds-L keep me connected.

- - Dave Nutter

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Re: [cayugabirds-l] ebird reporting question re: motion activated photos

2020-05-13 Thread Dave Nutter 
Some thoughts about eBird & non-standard reports: EBird has more than one 
purpose. 

Certainly ornithologists want usable data, and that means lots of reports made 
in the same way. That’s why eBird promotes “complete” checklists of a certain 
length and time, which can be thrown in the same pile for statistical purposes. 
Reports which don’t meet those standards must be easily separated by how they 
are labeled. But that doesn’t mean they should not be in eBird at all. Perhaps 
the query about reports long after they were submitted was to find out whether 
they were usable for a particular study. 

The reason eBird can collect enough data to use for statistical purposes is 
because birders find the program useful and fun. Promoting awareness of birds 
and conservation issues, which I hope includes birding, are functions the Lab 
of O and eBird program. To me as a birder, eBird is great for a couple of 
reasons. 

First, I can keep track of what I’ve observed and include all my obscure and 
excruciating notes and terrible photos (See if you can make use of *that*, 
Merlin!). And my lists are not all statistically usable data for many 
ornithological purposes. I have modified my birding to try to help the 
ornithologists with standard complete lists, but when I find an interesting 
bird even though I wasn’t doing a formal timed birding session, I try to do an 
“incidental” eBird report. 

Second, I can find out what other people have found, including their notes, 
photos, & audio. To me this is interesting and satisfying whether or not I want 
to chase it. Especially for species which I have seen before, I can enjoy 
someone else’s photo instead of burning gasoline and destroying the climate by 
chasing it. When Dave Kennedy makes a local trip to Montezuma and puts his 
fantastic photos in eBird, I have *less* need to drive 100miles. I would love 
to see “camera trap” photos and would support their inclusion in eBird. That’s 
how we learned that a Crested Caracara showed up to feed on carrion in Wayne 
County in 2018. I enjoy the audio from night flight calls (NFCs), even though 
my hearing isn’t good enough to detect them. I use eBird to find out what has 
been found in the Cayuga Lake Basin. I use eBird to learn about the ranges of 
“our” species when they are not here. I use eBird to learn about species I will 
never personally see because I expect never to fly again, and even trips more 
than a couple counties away (let alone south Texas!) have huge questions now. 
My birding this spring has been almost exclusively where I walk and bike, but 
eBird and CayugaBirds-L keep me connected. 

- - Dave Nutter
> 

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RE: [cayugabirds-l] ebird reporting question re: motion activated photos

2020-05-12 Thread Wesley M. Hochachka 
Hi everyone,

   As one of the people at the Lab of O who regularly works with data from 
eBird, I’ll give you my take on answering Deb’s question, from the perspective 
of someone who is interested in using the data from eBird for research, both 
for basic science, and applied conservation and management purposes.  However, 
much of what I’ll write also applies to birders wanting to know when and where 
they can find a species of interest to them.  For all of these purposes, it is 
important that we can learn both where a species of bird exists, as well as 
where a species does *not* exist.  In order to understand where a species does 
not exist, eBird uses two types of information.

   First, there is the answer to the question “is this a complete checklist of 
all bird species that you detected and identified?”  If the answer to this 
question is “no, this is not a complete list”, then we have no clue whether any 
particular species not on that checklist was actually present.  However, if the 
question is answered “yes, I am reporting all of the species that I saw and 
identified” then we at least know that the species in question was either: (1) 
really not present, or (2) present but undetected.

   The second type of information collected by eBird is needed in order to help 
distinguish between a species not being present, or that species just evading 
detection even though it was actually at the location.  This second type of 
information is what we generally refer to as “effort information”, things like: 
the length of time spent birding, the distance traveled while birding, the time 
of day, and the number of people in the group that was birding.  The longer 
someone spends looking for birds, the more likely it is that they’ll find and 
identify a species, when that species is actually present.  The more pairs of 
eyes and ears looking and listening for birds, the more likely that any bird 
will be found…at least up to a point: we’re found that as the size of birding 
groups gets too large, the likelihood of finding some species will decline.  
The time of day is important, because some bird species have times of day (or 
night) when they’re easily found, but other times at which it’s essentially 
impossible to detect a species, for example because the species becomes silent 
and inactive.

   Simplifying things (a lot), it’s possible to figure out where a species is 
not found, by giving more weight to checklists on which a species was very 
likely to have been reported, *if* the species had actually been present (i.e. 
checklists from observations collected with sufficient effort and at a time of 
day when a species would likely to have been detected if it was present).  
Also, it’s important to have information from a large number of checklists, 
such that you’re more confident that a species is absent if many observers 
haven’t reported a species.  It’s still impossible to be absolutely certain 
that a species is absent, especially for hard-to-see species like owls and 
rails, so in the end the best anyone can do is to conclude that it is highly 
likely that a species is not present.

   Some people might know that there are methods that have been created for 
analyzing “presence-only” data, but we’ve concluded that they should basically 
never be used with data from eBird.  We’ve experimented with dumbing down eBird 
data --- removing all of the effort information --- and trying out these 
presence-only analysis methods on the resultant data.  We’ve found that these 
presence-only methods do a worse job of describing where a species is and is 
not present.  Even the creator of the most widely used method for analyzing 
presence-only data has told us that it makes no sense to use his analysis 
methods with information from eBird.  These presence-only analysis methods are 
a sort of desperation option for use with information that comes from sources 
like museum specimens, for which there are just a bunch of presence 
“observations” sitting in boxes and drawers.

   So…what has this got to do with camera traps?  The problem is that there’s 
no good way to report effort (would you report just the minute in which a bird 
triggered the camera, the entire hour before the picture was taken, the 
half-hour afterward?).  The idea of a “complete” checklist is also stretched to 
the breaking point, because these cameras don’t identify birds by their 
vocalizations which is very different than many or most birders, so a camera 
trap may have close to zero chance to detecting most of the birds species in an 
area.  Also, is someone likely to report every species photographed, or just 
the species that they think are particularly interesting?
   Admittedly, it would be possible to cobble together some sort of effort 
information, but cameras are so different from human beings that any 
information from camera traps in eBird would just introduce noise into any sort 
of analysis or interpretation that is bas

Re: [cayugabirds-l] ebird reporting question re: motion activated photos

2020-05-12 Thread Tom Schulenberg 
Maybe someone can clarify or refer me to the right place. I have lived and
> birded in the Cayugabirds region for 30+ years and use ebird
>
>
questions regarding eBird should be directed to

eb...@cornell.edu

good birding,

tss

-- 
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Research Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods Road
Ithaca  NY  14850
http://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/portal/home
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/clementschecklist

voice:  607.254.1113
email:  ts...@cornell.edu, tschulenb...@gmail.com

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Re: [cayugabirds-l] ebird reporting question re: motion activated photos

2020-05-12 Thread Therese O'Connor 
Interesting. Three weeks ago I received a "question" from ebird asking me
if I had "additional information" about a siting I had in Seattle in *2014!*
I wonder what took them so long to question my birdstrange.
Therese O'Connor

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 5:35 PM Deborah G Lauper 
wrote:

> Maybe someone can clarify or refer me to the right place. I have lived and
> birded in the Cayugabirds region for 30+ years and use ebird. I also spend
> winters in Arizona, specifically Pima County (near Tucson, Madera Canyon
> etc). Owls have been visiting our bird baths nightly. Great Horned and
> Western Screech, got great pictures on motion activated cams. I recently
> learned that ebird does not want motion activated pictures and also, don't
> bother reporting it unless you saw it directly. My question is why? The
> ebird expert/monitor from this county (great guy by the way) advised me of
> this and said he doesn’t agree with it and doesn’t know the rationale
> either. Anyway, it’s amazing what we get on our motion cameras, mammals and
> birds, and it would be great to be able to include the birds on ebird. I
> want to be as accurate as possible and follow the rules so I deleted my owl
> pictures and sightings but I’m disappointed and hope I can get an
> explanation.
> Deb Lauper (Corning, NY and Sahuarita, AZ)
>
>
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