Avian Ecologist

My Journey Looking Through Binoculars

In the many articles I see out there on how to get started birding, they talk about essential optics, so I thought I’d share my journey through binocular ownership. We had an old pair of binoculars at my home, that I would use to occasionally look at birds and other things outside. When I took […]

Watching Birds: My Early Experiences

My Story I didn’t really know a lot about birds when I was young beyond what my dad taught me from our backyard feeders, but for whatever weird reason, I tried to memorize our old Audubon guide when I was little. I was never sure of my knowledge, though, without a true birding mentor. Maybe […]

How to Get Involved in Birding through Clubs

Here’s a guide to organizations I’ve personally interacted with and would recommend (though I know of several others in nearby locations and am happy to recommend if you leave a comment). This is where you can meet up with birders, find guided walks/events and other local birding information. Mid-Atlantic Howard County Bird Club Delmarva Birding […]

Connectivity for Re-analysis of “Ch. 3”

Today we started playing around with some options for doing a connectivity analysis. We’re converting a raster to polygon to facilitate constructing a network.

GIS for Fun: My Digitized BBS Route

The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) was meant to be a stratified random sample of the continent’s terrestrial bird populations, so we could monitor the pulse of populations and trends. When I went to the American Ornithologists’ U/COS conference (back when it was still called that) in 2015, I presented in a symposium dedicated […]

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 […]