Using Knowledge Networks and Data Sharing to Advance Bird Conservation and Research Endeavors

Workshop Leaders

The workshop will be held on Tuesday, August 13th, 9am-12:30pm, at The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. It is part of the 2013 joint meeting of the Cooper Ornithological Society and the American Ornithologists’ Union, August 13-17, 2013.

Rationale

The model for how aggregations of data can be used in bird conservation has evolved over the last ten years from centralized data management to distributed data sharing, and the main hub for data sharing in North America is the Avian Knowledge Network (AKN). The AKN provides data and science-based answers to conservation and management needs from partners, including government, non-government, higher education, and private institutions. The AKN is capable of readily incorporating any avian monitoring or demographic dataset, ensuring that the data are safely kept and well described and that contributors’ intellectual rights are upheld. The AKN also enables the community of partners to discover the data, collaboratively to develop new and improved analyses and visualizations, and to use data to make conservation and management decisions. Workshop participants will receive hands-on training in using the Avian Knowledge Network and several of its nodes (California Avian Data Center, Midwest Avian Data Center, and Avian Knowledge Northwest) to find answers to common management problems. A brief introduction to the AKN will be followed by four step-by-step exercises intended to introduce participants to the use and limitations of AKN node decision support tools. Two more complex group problems will require more careful review of the data and information. Discussion will center on understanding the advantages and limitations of AKNnode tools, their proper use, and on feedback for future improvements or new tools.

AKN node links

Midwest Avian Data Center - http://data.prbo.org/partners/mwadc
California Avian Data Center - http://data.prbo.org/cadc
Avian Knowledge Northwest Data Center - http://www.avianknowledgenorthwest.net
Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory – http://www.rmbo.org/

Introduction to AKN node tools

The purpose of the following four exercises is to become familiar with the AKN tools and their use and limitations for problem-solving in typical conservation management situations. The first two examples use detailed step-by-step instructions on how to use the tools, while the latter two require a bit more thinking based on your experience with the previous exercises. If you get stuck on a problem, we will be in the room, ready to answer any questions.

There is no right or wrong answer to the problems; the tools are intended to aid decision-making by providing information from aggregated data. You are still required to judge the information and use it wisely when making decisions. We will ask that you simply explain what information you obtained, its utility in solving the problem, and its limitations. While conducting the exercises, please pay attention to the information the tool is providing, and keep in mind the following questions:

1. Was it easy to locate the information?
2. What exactly are the data in the tool telling you, and how do they help solve the problem?
3. What are the data not telling you that would help to solve the problem?
4. Can you think of a dataset that could provide more appropriate answers?
5. What other ways could you use the tool to gather more information?
6. Can you think of a grossly inappropriate use of the tool?
7. Any comments or recommendations for future improvement of this tool?

We look forward to hearing from you about your experiences with each exercise, especially your answers to the above!

Most importantly, the purpose of this workshop is for YOU to have a positive experience and familiarize yourself with the AKN. We want you to participate in the development of the AKN by joining in with your own datasets, suggesting or developing new tools for AKN data, or by using the AKN tools in your own work.

Exercise #1

On-line point count data entry into an AKN node

1. Go to the Midwest Avian Data Center: http://data.prbo.org/partners/mwadc/
2. Click on My MWADC and follow the screens to select a login role. Note that this exercise is just about entering data and the role for that is as Biologist. Other roles, such as Project Leader or Analyst, have other capacities. Click on Biologists to enter data as Biologist.
3. Login as:
   1. User: demo@mwadc.org
   2. Password: mwadc
4. Once you login, select to enter/proof Point Counts
5. You must then select a project for which you will add data. Users may have many projects they may work on; all projects to which they have access as Biologists are listed there. Select project DMWADC (the only project under your account)
6. Next, you must select a transect for which you’ll add data. Select the one assigned to you (look in your data sheet). Once you click on a transect, it will be highlighted in yellow. If there are already events stored for that transect, data about these will be shown on the right side of the screen.
7. The list of all sampling events in the database at that location will appear, if there are any, sorted by date. By clicking on Add New Observations you will go through the process of creating a new sampling event, providing information about the protocol and date used, and then adding the related observation data.
8. Add a visit number, date of visit, protocol and researcher, as indicated in the sheet provided to you.
9. Then you will be asked to enter a point, start time for your observations, time interval (select 0-5 minutes), and comments. Then click on Add Observations.
10. Each record is a species’ detections at that point in that time interval of the survey. Make sure to click on the “?” icon next to “Observation Data” to learn the many ways you can enter data for each species. You can also add detections of different individuals of the same species as different records. Note also how you would enter fly-over observations.
11. Once you entered all the data for the record, click on OK and the record will be added to a table above. You can edit your entries directly in that table, but remember to Save your edits.
12. Click on Proof Your Observations. Note now that proofed data are shown in a new table. Click on Add More Observations, but this time do not proof until you are done adding all your 3 records. As you add records, note how WMADC helps you locate the right species; try using the species search feature.
13. Once you are done entering your observations, add site conditions data (these are the weather and other data collected for the survey event). Click on the MWADC logo (the icon of the Midwest states at the top left of the page), go to Biologists, and then click on Site Conditions. Select the project (DMWADC), transect and survey date (see your sampling event data). Then provide the site condition data for that event.

BONUS: Once you are done entering your data, if you have time, look at the Analyst exercise on the other side of the data page. To go to the Analyst tool, click on the MWADC logo (the map of the Midwest, on the upper left corner), then select Analyst Toolbox. Click on Point Counts. Select the project INDIBA, which has all of the data you’ve entered pre-loaded and ready to analyze. From here, try different locations, species, dates, habitat and analyses.

Exercise #2

Timing of restoration activities at Tamarac NWR

You are part of a team of cutting-edge university undergrads called in to advise the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) on habitat management at Tamarac National Wildlife Refuge. The USFWS has approved funds to conduct restoration activities on the refuge. From the description of actions, you learn that marsh vegetation around Upper Egg, Flat, and Pine Lakes will be restored substantially. You also see that some shrub/ early successional forested areas will be affected. You are asked to provide an initial assessment of the best month of the calendar year to perform the restoration. What would you advise?

1. Launch MWADC (http://data.prbo.org/partners/mwadc), go to the Maps tab, and select Map-Based Access to Avian Data.
2. Locate the Refuge: enable US Protected Areas Database and Map Labels by clicking on the appropriate boxes. Use the spatial search tool (Zoom to:) to find the refuge. Once there, zoom out until you see something like the figure on the right.
3. Next, activate the eBird, BBS, MAPS, and Minnesota IBA datasets. What data are there? Click anywhere on the dark green polygon. Careful, don't click on any colored dots: Why? What happens when you click on a dot?
4. A list of species and numbers of detections appears on the right – a good representation of all the birds in Minnesota! You want to focus on some of them. You could use the Birds of North America dataset to determine which species may be more affected and when, or perhaps other criteria.
5. You want to consider especially any bird species of conservation concern. Appendix D of a report (http://www.fws.gov/Midwest/planning/tamarac/FinalCCP/App_D.pdf) from the Tamarac NWR contains such a list, but you suspect it may be out of date. You want the latest and greatest landbird conservation assessment, so you decide to check out the Partners in Flight Species Assessment Database at http://rmbo.org/pifdb (For future reference, note that the link to the Handbook explains the assessment methodology). Check out the latest breeding scores. Which BCR should you consider? (Hint: inspect the MWADC base layer.) Sort by RCS-b (Regional Combined Score). Of the top four high-priority species, which are in steepest decline? Which have the smallest population rangewide? Which have the largest share of their populations within the BCR?
6. Of the four high-priority species, which occur on the refuge? Are any of these detected on the BBS route within the refuge? (Click on the red dots representing BBS stops.) How do detections compare to those for American Redstart or Chestnut-sided Warbler? Is either of these two species in trouble?
7. Click on the link for American Redstart. When is the species in the Refuge? Are populations on the refuge doing well? How does that high priority warbler from step (5) appear to be doing on the refuge relative to its rangewide status? Do you think either of these species could handle the disturbance the restoration work may cause? When would be the best time to do the restorations?
8. Just for a minute, let’s question the need for the proposed restoration work. Is this work really needed? Click on the Avian Summary link (at the top of the species list) and see the trend in richness. Is the restoration work justified?

Additional considerations: restoration may happen outside of the breeding season; do we have the data to know when it may be best to do it? How can we use the tool with eBird data to answer that? BBS data can be “noisy and spotty;” can we rely on it as we did above to evaluate the need for restoration? Are the observed patterns due to changes in the Refuge, or due to larger-scale processes?

Exercise #3

Suburban growth in the Iowa Prairie Potholes region

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is concerned about future projections and plans for suburban growth around Gilmore City in Humboldt County—in the heart of the Southern Prairie Potholes and next to Pioneer Prairie Pothole Wildlife Area in nearby Pocahontas County. You are part of an Iowa State ornithology class team that has been tasked to help decision makers identify the top three species breeding in the region that should be candidates for a mitigation program, as these may be negatively affected by the planned developments. Which species would you initially recommend for targeted monitoring, and why?

1. We do not need spatial queries for this problem, although we could do it with the map tool. Since we just want to know which species may breed in the region, let’s use the histogram tool. Go to the Data tab and click on Avian Data Histograms.
2. When the tool appears, note that you may select a state and county to query (IA + Humboldt). Look here for a list of important species— http://www.iowadnr.gov/Education/IowasWildlife.aspx. For the Iowa publication, be sure to scroll down and find the list of Iowa T&E list. (Consider using the PIF Assessment Database, as you did in the previous exercise, and compare to this list)
3. Using the MWADC histogram tool, select, one by one or simultaneously (just hold down the Ctl key while clicking on a species name) the five species you identified in the document in step (2). Did you find any data? (Note: make sure to search all datasets.) Is the tool wrong, is there no data (if so, why?), or is the above document wrong?
(TIP: when searching one-by-one, rather than scrolling down the list of species names, click on one and then quickly type the first three letters of the species you want)
4. Repeat your search, this time for All Counties.
5. You were asked to identify three species of conservation importance breeding in the region. Let's say these are Cerulean Warbler, Henslow’s Sparrow, and King Rail. Can you tell if they breed in Iowa? Can you tell if they breed in Pocahontas County?
6. The PIF Population Estimates Database is another tool that can be used to gain insight about occurrence of birds within a region. Unlike the Species Assessment Database, it provides resolution at the scale of state x BCR polygons. Visit http://rmbo.org/pifdb/ again and go to the Population Estimates Database.
7. Chose Scale: BCR within Province/State, BCR: 11, and Province/State: Iowa. According to the PIF population estimates, what are the two most abundant birds in the Prairie Potholes region of Iowa? What are the estimated populations of Henslow's Sparrow and Cerulean Warbler? How about those two species throughout the state? What about King Rail?
8. What would be your recommendation for mitigation actions for species of concern breeding in the region, based on what you learned in this exercise?

Other considerations: What did you learn from the tools? Would you recommend specific mitigation actions based on the state list, even if you have no evidence of any of the listed species occurring in the region? Or would you base your recommendation on data for the entire state, hoping for the best outcome (i.e., “build it and they will come”)? If you had used the PIF Species Assessment and Population Estimates databases instead of the state's T&E list, would your recommendations have been any different? Would you recommend surveys before any developments happen? How would you justify that recommendation?

Exercise #4

Dredging Elkhorn Slough, Monterrey Bay, CA

This is a warm-up exercise for a problem using a similar tool in the next section

Monterrey Bay is an international scenic and touristic attraction. The largest tract of tidal salt marsh in California outside of the San Francisco Bay is located there, in the Elkhorn Slough. Although the Slough is protected under several figures and jurisdictions, it is embedded in a mosaic of developments and roads. A major business group wants to attract fishermen and boaters to the region and have requested permits to dredge the slough. A hydrologist in your team indicated that if the dynamics of sedimentation are altered, there may be a net loss of mud flats. What can you say about the potential impact of that loss on shorebirds in there?

Some hints:

1. Use the PFSS tool (http://data.prbo.org/apps/pfss)
2. Elkhorn Slough is a Site (not a sub-site, habitat or other category)
3. Keep it simple: Start with Summary Information for all years, then drill in on density for a particular species of interest
4. CADC has a document that can help you make a choice; look under Habitat Management tab for the Southern Pacific Shorebird Conservation Plan, and read on page 6 – two of the species listed there will also appear in the summary report from the tool
5. To assess the relevance of Elkhorn Slough, consider the figures presented in that document for wintering numbers of the species you chose. Compare them to the numbers reported by the tool (also wintering abundance)
6. At the bottom of the summary report from the tool you will find a list of all taxa detected at Elkhorn Slough. Are other important shorebird species using that area?

Other considerations: There are only 3 years of data in the tool for Elkhorn Slough. Is that enough to make a case for restricting or prohibiting the proposed developments? Sometimes, just the presence of an important species is enough, but did having abundance estimates help make a stronger case? Did it help you think differently about the development proposal’s overall impact? Will the proposed changes affect just wintering shorebirds? How can you tell which species breeding there or year-round residents may be affected? What is this tool not telling you?

Conservation Problem

Choose to work on either Problem A or B, and preferably in groups of 2-3.

Problem A

Responding to appeals and litigation directed at National Forests within the Sierra Nevada region

You work for the USFS and were just informed that it has been brought to court for litigation based on the apparent negative consequences of their management practices on the official management indicator species (i.e., all indicator species) in the Plumas National Forest. Is the lawsuit well founded?

Hints:

1. http://data.prbo.org/apps/snamin
2. Plumas is located between Lassen (to the north) and Tahoe (to the south) National Forests. You may want to see what’s going on there as well
3. You may want to group these National Forests and get a sense of the problem at a larger scale
4. You have free reign to explore at will (within our time limits). Here are some potential questions you may want to dig into:
   1. Are all four indicator species declining at Plumas? Or just one or two?
   2. How is the decline happening? Just in numbers, an artifact of imperfect detection, or a decline in occupancy too?
   3. There are three ranger districts in Plumas: Beckwourth, Feather River and Mt. Hough. Is the decline similar in all three?
   4. Anything else you may want to notice about other species or about diversity in general at Plumas National Forest?

Discussion pointers: What did you learn from this exercise? What information are you missing? What is this tool not telling you? Are the four indicator species year-round residents? Do they breed in there, or stop over while migrating? Can you explain the underlying reasons for the patterns you discovered? If you are a juror sitting in the court room, what would you decide on this lawsuit?

Problem B

Oregon DFW plans to monitor for climate change effects on habitats in the Pacific Northwest

For this problem, we will trust your instincts on how to use the node tool. There are appropriate ways to use climate change projections for management, but unless you are familiar with the risk management and scenario planning literature, we do not expect that you delve into great detail in this exercise. So, please keep it simple.

You work for ODFW and you know that the North Pacific LCC recently funded the development of a tool to assist in understanding and planning for climate change effects on habitats in the region (http://data.prbo.org/apps/nplcc). The tool is just out and will be enhanced in the coming months, but some information can be presently obtained from it. Your task is to try to understand potential impacts on habitats in Central Oregon, near Eugene.

Here are some questions that may help you decide where to monitor and what to measure:

1. Which habitat(s) will be most affected, positively and negatively? How do you know that?
2. What species would you monitor? What is the preferred vegetation type of these species?
3. How are conifer forests expected to change into the future in Oregon?
4. Would you monitor areas that are projected to change very little (i.e., refugia) or areas where the change is projected to be large?

Discussion pointers: What did you learn from this tool? How much weight would you put on any particular projected result? Imagine we showed you the proper way to use these data (i.e., scenario planning and risk management methods) – why is it important to use these climate change projections? How would this tool be inappropriately used? At what spatial scale are results more appropriately used? OK to zoom in to particular townships or even counties? What timeframe should you consider managing for when using this tool? (In case you noticed: there is no information about timelines in the tool, and this is intentional – however, the projections are based on global circulation models’ projections for 2100)