For each species, there’s essentially a weighted range map produced with the BBS data. You can download the shape file for any species, which is a grid with abundance indices in each cell. This is useful if you need to work with distributions of species for spatial analyses. For my purposes, I determined which Bird […]

I’m still not happy with how much I rely on closed-source software like ArcGIS. Yet, I don’t do enough GIS to feel like I can invest the time to learn something new. Also, open-source alternatives are hard to get started with IMO. That sense comes from dabbling, and admittedly not a concerted effort. But, it’s […]

I put the camera on the ground in the backyard, and captured my quarry: white-crowned sparrow! The most I counted at a time was 4 individuals. These birds looked closest to the eastern taiga subspecies, but I wonder if we might get individuals from the inter-grade zone. Probably the thing I love most about the feeder cam is […]

What else would you expect, then, but a house sparrow? They’re now abundant across the U.S., and not many people’s favorite birds (here) because they evict cavity nesting birds. Yet, I get many pictures of them! As a conservationist, I’m guilty of just being annoyed by them and wanting them gone. As an ecologist, though, […]

I run all my BBS analyses on our Linux servers, so I’ve picked up some bash scripting tricks along the way. If you have a screen you want to kill (and there are multiple running), first find its name and then kill it. screen -ls screen -X -S [session # you want to kill] kill […]

(This post is backdated in keeping with the chronology of the camera footage.) Either there’s some delay in the camera transferring images to the card, or I overlooked this (entirely possible), but I captured a white-crowned sparrow on the front feeder cam! I was hoping to, because the camera can still get the wi-fi there, […]

This has become a favorite destination of mine for the Big Green Birding Year (BIGBY). Today, in honor of the end of National Wildflower Week, we found red trillium!

In 1851, the original land surveyors described the area as a wet, quaking marsh, “over which we crossed with not a little danger to our lives.”

I’m working on “the standard” FRAGSTATS questions within buffers of BBS routes. I need to compute spatial stats for each region (i.e. BBS buffer) using the National Land Cover Data (NLCD) 2011. Patch Grid has a convenient tool, Spatial Statistics (by Regions) to compute FRAGSTATS metrics by shape file-defined areas. Unfortunately, though, I get a cryptic “error […]

My analyses are computationally intensive, so I whittle down the data frame as much as I can. For one, I drop columns I don’t need. BBS$countrynum <- NULL It’s also convenient that routes are associated with regions in the routes.csv file. So, once I merge that data, I can choose to keep only routes in […]