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.