This meeting and presentation took place entirely online via Zoom.
At 7:00 pm, President Debbie Mullins called the Society meeting to order.
President Mullins made the following announcements:
- She welcomed all to the February meeting of the Linnaean Society of New York.
- She noted that the annual meeting is just four weeks away, on Tuesday, March 11, at the Liederkranz Club on East 87th Street; it starts at 7:30 pm and is free of charge.
- The meeting is for members only (those who are up-to-date with their dues).
- There is still time to become a member in time to join the meeting. The membership application is on the Linnaean website at linnaeannewyork.org under Members/Join.
- Those who have forgotten to pay their fall dues can pay now in order to attend the meeting.
- Registration is online at members.linnaeannewyork.org/events
- There will also be a cocktail reception before the meeting, starting at 6:00 pm. Tickets to the reception are $135 per person.
- Among the awards being presented at the annual meeting are the following:
- The Eisenmann Medal, the Society’s highest honor, to Dr. Brian Watts. He will give the keynote address, “Eagles of the Chesapeake”.
- The Natural History Service Award to Dr. Dustin Partridge, Director of Conservation and Science at the New York City Bird Alliance.
- The Shelda Taylor Award to Jennifer Stalec, a teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
- Raffle tickets are $5. There will also be a silent auction with many offerings, including original art work by Alan Messer and a private boat tour of Jamaica Bay led by Don Riepe.
- Volunteers are still needed for the evening. If you can help, email Debbie Mullins at president@linnaeannewyork.org.
- President Mullins welcomed the following new Linnaean Society members:
- Joseph McManus
- Pieter Prall
- Julia Zichello
At 7:03 pm, President Mullins turned to the lecture program and introduced the speaker, Dr. Wesley Hochachka, senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY. Dr. Hochachka is an ornithologist with a background in field studies of birds and data analysis, and is part of the eBird organization. He has been working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology since 1998.
Lecture: “Informing Basic Science and Conservation with Bird Watchers’ Observations (and Lots of Computers),” presented by Dr. Wesley Hochachka
Dr. Hochachka began his talk with a contextual overview of eBird, the citizen-science tool for worldwide bird data collection of the presence, location, and abundance of individual bird species. He explained that eBird provides the platform and system management support for birders to catalog their observations, and makes those observations available (in many forms) for researchers, organizations, and the general public.
To give a sense of the scope and the range of the data within eBird, Dr. Hochachka gave the most recent number of total checklists submitted as of a few hours before this talk: 111 million. He observed that the data are not evenly distributed around the globe, illustrating with a world map. Not surprisingly, some of the highest concentrations of observations are in North America, parts of Europe, India, and elsewhere that eBird has developed partnerships and where eBird is widely used.
This led to the next important point about eBird data that Dr. Hochachka made: in addition to the enormous amount of eBird being gathered, it is also “noisy,” in part because of the way it is gathered. The signal-to-noise ratio is very low, and methods are needed to identify patterns and trends from the data. Hence, the eBird organization has a data analysis team that works on many aspects of managing the data including: 1) developing methods to interpret them; 2) providing resources, documentation, and software tools for others to work with the data; and 3) conducting analyses using the supercomputer resources of the National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program to provide more manageable information and products.
Dr. Hochachka presented examples of products that eBird is currently producing; those that are in the development stage; and others that are in areas for future work. From the “Status and Trends” project, Dr. Hochachka showed an abundance map and a trends map for Wood Thrush. Both the maps and the data underlying them are available to the public. Under development are “Trajectory” data products that aim to use eBird data to model species year-to-year abundance changes much like the results obtained from breeding bird surveys. Other ongoing projects are tailored for specific studies. Some work involves data analysis collaborations with partners on stewardship projects. Future data coordination and analysis might include audio recording data.
Dr. Hochachka concluded his talk with a set of takeaways about eBird that he wanted to convey to the audience from his perspective as a data analyst:
- There are lots of data, albeit noisy data.
- Dealing with the noisiness requires lots of computation.
- We aim to direct this computation toward the useful goals of partners.
- eBird should never be considered a universal substitute for rigorously designed surveys.
Following is Dr. Hochachka’s abstract of his talk.
Formal bird monitoring programs, such as the North American Breeding Bird Survey, are invaluable sources of information about where birds live and how their numbers have changed through time. However, the costs of running such programs mean that they cannot be run throughout the year or across very large numbers of locations. The large quantities of information being collected by participatory (or citizen) science projects, most notably by eBird, have the potential to fill in gaps in our knowledge of bird populations. Careful analyses are needed in order to separate changes in bird populations from changes in the behavior of the bird watchers who provide their observations. In his presentation, he will talk about some of the insights into bird populations that have been revealed from eBird’s data and the uses of these insights. Weekly maps of the distributions of birds provide information about areas of concentration and migratory movements, which has been used to design and implement conservation programs and to inform policy decisions. Estimates of local changes in population size (“trend maps”) complement the information provided by the Breeding Bird Survey. He will conclude by describing some of our ongoing and future work, and plans for making the insights from eBird’s data more widely and easily available to a variety of audiences.
At 7:53 pm, Vice President Doug Futuyma hosted the Q&A session.
At the conclusion of the Q&A, Vice President Futuyma thanked Dr. Hochachka for his presentation, and noted that the number of questions clearly showed a great interest by the many birders who use eBird to understand how it works and what is being done with the data that is collected.
At 8:36 pm the meeting was adjourned.
The presentation has been recorded in its entirety, including the Q&A session and the president’s opening remarks. The recording is available for viewing on the Linnaean Society of New York website under the dropdown menu: Programs/Watch/ and on the Society’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@linnaeanny/videos.
Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary