Avian Ecologist

Proposed Tiers of Birding Involvement

My post critiquing the latest federal report trying to quantify birders suggested that perhaps we try to break birding into additional categories, to somehow scale between the active birding community and the federal report’s estimated number of birders. I’m open to name changes, commentary, new definitions, etc. but here’s where I’m at. These should be thought of […]

Misadventures in Open Source GIS

When most ecologists conceptualize “GIS” we often think of a desktop GIS program, most likely ArcGIS. When we want to not use ArcGIS (or can’t), we most likely say “is there an R package for that?” In many cases, there is, and the repository keeps growing! The ever-growing number of R spatial packages reflects the […]

True Life as a Continual “Student”

It’s a sign of a good attitude when you hear people say they’re perpetually a student of life. Academia is, unsurprisingly, one of the career tracks where you’re seemingly always learning something new for your job, and I think all of us are here because we love to learn. I’d venture a guess that science […]

Critique of the Federal Birding Report

In 2011, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) published “Birding in the United States: A Demographic and Economic Analysis.” It was created as an addendum to the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation. They claim it’s the most extensive survey of wildlife recreation in the U.S. to date. “Overall, about 9,300 detailed […]

Extracting NetCDF Values to a Shape File

Here’s a script that loops over climate NetCDF bricks in a folder and extracts the values for each layer in the brick of each file, in this case averaged over polygons in a shape file. At this point, you have a data frame called “climate” that has all your data long-form. You can cast this […]

Why Define What it is to Be a Birder?

I think the crux our pursuit in defining what it is to be a birder is that we’re looking to define criteria for membership of our tribe, which would be the group of people that “speaks the same language as us.” We recognize each other by our habits and field gear, and location. We can assume […]

Thinking of Birding As “Serious Leisure”

My colleague and friend Dr. Susan I. Stewart pointed me in the right direction regarding terminology of the recreation, leisure and tourism disciplines, in order to turn up literature about birding. “Serious leisure” investigates the recruitment and retention of people into pursuits that are more serious than common notions of recreation, but still considered a hobby […]

How This Problematic NetCDF File Was Fixed

I can’t be thankful enough for my godsend Twitter friend/NetCDF guru Michael Sumner for coming in clutch to rectify this problematic file! As I take my baby steps in learning how to deal with NetCDF files (~3 weeks after being thrown into the “deep end” and trying to tread water), I realized that one of […]

Next NetCDF Issue I Discovered Today

Another problem I ran into: apparently Nov-Dec. 1999 monthly averages for HADCM3 B1 precipitation, where I flipped the axes in NCO, are blank. problem <- brick(“hadcm3.b1.pr.NAm.grid_monthly.nc_out.nc”) plot(problem$X1999.11.15) plot(problem$X1999.12.16) The above returns the correct axes, but blank plots. The problem is present before I flipped the axes, so I have to go back to the original […]

My 1st Breeding Bird Survey Route!

It feels appropriate that I made my 1st contribution to the BBS today, as a form of conservation patriotism! It’s one of the longest-running and most extensive citizen science efforts in the world, and I was happy to kick off my Independence Day contributing to this data set. The timing also comes on the heels […]