http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/science/earth/crowdsourcing-for-the-birds.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130820
NY Times, August 19,
2013
Crowdsourcing, for
the Birds
By JIM
ROBBINS
HELENA, Mont. — On a warm morning not long ago
on the shore of a small prairie lake outside this state capital, Bob Martinka
trained his spotting scope on a towering cottonwood tree heavy with blue heron
nests. He counted a dozen of the tall, graceful birds and got out his
smartphone, not to make a call but to type the number of birds and the species
into an app that sent the information to researchers in New York.
Mr. Martinka, a retired state wildlife
biologist and an avid bird-watcher, is part of the global ornithological network
eBird.
Several times a week he heads into the mountains to scan lakes, grasslands, even
the local dump, and then reports his sightings to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a nonprofit
organization based at Cornell University.
“I see rare gulls at the dump quite
frequently,” Mr. Martinka said, scanning a giant mound of bird-covered trash.
Tens of thousands of birders are now what the
lab calls “biological sensors,” turning their sightings into digital data by
reporting where, when and how many of which species they see. Mr. Martinka’s
sighting of a dozen herons is a tiny bit of information, but such bits, gathered
in the millions, provide scientists with a very big picture: perhaps the first
crowdsourced, real-time view of bird populations around the world.
Birds are notoriously hard to count. While
stationary sensors can measure things like carbon dioxide levels and highway
traffic, it takes people to note the type and number of birds in an area. Until
the advent of eBird, which began collecting daily global data in 2002, so-called
one-day counts were the only method.
While counts like the Audubon Christmas Bird
Count and the Breeding
Bird Survey bring a lot of people together on one day to make bird
observations across the country, and are scientifically valuable, they are
different because they don’t provide year-round data.
And eBird’s daily view of bird movements has
yielded a vast increase in data — and a revelation for scientists. The most
informative product is what scientists call a heat map: a striking image of the
bird sightings represented in various shades of orange according to their
density, moving through space and time across black maps. Now, more than 300
species have a heat map of their own.
“As soon as the heat maps began to come out,
everybody recognized this is a game changer in how we look at animal populations
and their movement,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab.
“Really captivating imagery teaches us more effectively.”
It was long believed, for example, that the
United States had just one population of orchard orioles. Heat maps showed that
the sightings were separated by a gap, meaning there are not one but two
genetically distinct populations.
Moreover, the network offers a powerful way to
capture data that was lost in the old days. “People for generations have been
accumulating an enormous amount of information about where birds are and have
been,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “Then it got burned when they died.”
No longer: eBird has compiled 141 million
reports, or bits, and the number is increasing by 40 percent a year. In May,
eBird gathered a record 5.6 million new observations from 169 countries. (Mr.
Martinka’s sighting of 12 herons at once, for example, is considered one species
observation, or bit.)
The system also offers incentives for birders
to stay involved, with apps that enable them to keep their life lists (records
of the species they have seen), compare their sightings with those of friends
(and rivals), and know where to look for birds they haven’t seen before.
“When you get off the plane and turn your phone
on,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said, “you can find out what has been seen near you over
the last seven days and ask it to filter out the birds you haven’t seen yet, so
with a quick look you can add to your life list.”
The system is not without problems. Citizen
scientists may not be as precise in reporting data as experienced researchers
are, like the ones in the Breeding Bird Survey. Cornell has tried to solve that
problem by hiring top birders to travel around the world to train people like
Mr. Martinka in methodology. And 500 volunteer experts read the submissions for
accuracy, rejecting about 2 percent. Rare-bird sightings get special scrutiny.
The engine that makes eBird data usable is
machine learning, or artificial intelligence — a combination of software and
hardware that sorts through disparities, gaps and flaws in data collection,
improving as it goes along.
“Machine learning says, ‘I know these data are
sloppy, but fortunately there’s a lot of it,’ ” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “It
takes chunks of these data and sorts through to find patterns in the noise.
These programs are learning as they go, testing and refining and getting better
and better.”
Still, some experts question eBird’s validity.
John Sauer, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological Survey, says
that bird-watchers’ reports lack scientific rigor. Rather than randomness, he
said, “you get a lot of observations from where people like to go.” And he
doubts that Cornell has proved the reliability of its machine learning efforts.
Still, the information has promise, he said,
“and it’s played a powerful role in coordinating birders for recording
observations, and encouraging bird-watching.”
And the data are being used by a wide array of
researchers and conservationists.
Cagan H. Sekercioglu, a professor of
ornithology at the University of Utah who has used similar bird-watching data in
his native Turkey to study the effects of climate change on birds, called eBird
“a phenomenal resource” and said that it was “getting young people involved in
natural history, which might seem slow and old-fashioned in the age of instant
online gratification.”
Data about bird populations can help scientists
understand other changes in the natural world and be a marker for the health of
overall biodiversity. “Birds are great indicators because they occur in all
environments,” said Steve Kelling, the director of information science at the
Cornell bird lab.
A decline in Eastern meadowlarks in part of New
York State, for example, suggests that their habitat is shrinking — bad news for
other species that depend on the same habitat. In California, eBird data is
being used by some planners to decide where cities and towns should steer
development.
The data is also being combined with radar and
weather data by BirdCast, another Cornell
bird lab project that forecasts migration patterns with the aim of protecting
birds as they move through a gantlet of threats. “We can predict migration
events that would be usable for the timing of wind generation facilities to be
turned off at night,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said.
In California, biologists use the migration
data to track waterfowl at critical times. When the birds are headed through the
Central Valley, for example, they can ask rice farmers to flood their fields to
create an improvised wetland habitat before the birds arrive. “The resolution is
at such a level of detail they can make estimates of where species occur almost
at a field-by-field level,” Mr. Kelling said.
EBird data has been used in Britain, too,
combined with that of a similar program called BirdTrack, which uses radar images,
weather models and even data from microphones on top of buildings to record the
sounds of migrating birds at night.
And for bird-watchers, the eBird project has
given their pastime a new sense of purpose. “It’s a really neat tool,” Mr.
Martinka said. “If you see one bird or a thousand, it’s significant.”