State of the Birds

In class we looked at how we might predict how different species of birds would fare in the future, but how are they doing now?  The Audubon Society has produced its State of the Birds report, and you'll find it interesting reading.  Forest birds in the east are taking it on the chin.

R resources

I've sent out some R resources before, but I thought I would repost a couple good ones here. The first is the Quick-R Home Page. This can get you answers to some tough problems fast (e.g., picking among some of the advanced graphical parameters--what does pch=19 look like, anyway?). Another resource that can lead you through the basics, in addition to the excellent R introduction at CRAN, can be found with the SimpleR package.

Here are a couple of more resources that you might find useful.  Emmanuel Paradis' book R for Beginners is a nice introduction with code, and Dave Roberts' R for Ecologists pdf is a good resource as well.  His  R Labs for Vegetation Ecologists are also great.  And, if you're interested in continuing on with quantitative analysis in ecology, Ben Bolker's Ecological Models and Data in R is great, and for the hardened core of modelers, Jim Clark's Models for Ecological Data is the go-to book.

RFID tags

Reading about tagging sea turtles you might get discouraged about how we mark animals long-term. One thing that we can use is RFID chips. Here is a company that sells them too. Maybe a few turtles need these...

eBird

Hey guys, here is a cool tool for birding in North Carolina--it lets you look at where the species have been seen and maps it in Google Earth.  There have been a couple of interesting sightings right around here if you want to go chase them!  More generally, eBird.org has a bunch of great resources for birding all over the US.

And, you got the email: 117 species for the weekend!  Excellent job.  I'll try and find an electronic list so you can replay the weekend's birds in your minds.

Finally, I talked with the motor pool and they are going to put "Biology" on the van so that we don't look so lame...

Software for modeling ecological responses to climate change

The US Forest Service thinks a lot about what is going to happen to natural systems in response to climate change.  The USFS Northern Research Station does a lot of this work.  Of particular interest to us is the Climate Change Atlas for trees and birds.  The tree data comes from the Forest Inventory Analysis, an inventory program that has a tree plot in every county in the eastern US (>100,000 plots!).  The bird data is from the Breeding Bird Survey data.  (Both of these data sets are available to you for projects.)

You also might be interested in some climate and land use change tools available on the USFS site.  Check here for a listing of online tools, and here for a list of software.  LANDIS and GIS-FIA might be particularly interesting.