Field Study and Paper Assignment
What to do by the data deadline:
1. Read the entirety of the assignment so that you understand what you will be doing and can have it in mind as you go out to the field.
2. Review the syllabus recommendations for fieldwork.
3. Complete the field exercise described below. Take a friend along! It’ll be more fun. Use the datasheet provided in Canvas (printed out) to collect your data in the field.
4. Fill in your data using the Google Form. If you enter something incorrectly and only notice after you have submitted the form, just resubmit.
Investigating the relationship between bird communities and habitat characteristics
In this assignment, each student will collect data on the bird community at one location of his or her choice to contribute to a larger dataset of areas to compare. The larger dataset will give you options around what question you want to address, but the basic question this project addresses is: How do bird diversity and abundance respond to land cover change and habitat structure? Have this in mind when you pick a location – don’t pick a place where you don’t really expect to see birds. We don’t expect you to be able to ID birds to species. You are welcome to identify the birds, but the approach we are using to measure diversity is a “morphospecies” measure – just how many different types of birds you see, without reference to their specific identities.
BECAUSE BIRDS AREN’T ALWAYS AROUND, PLAN TO DO THIS EXERCISE IN THE MORNING. Earlier the better, as long as it’s light out. Failing that, wait until the late afternoon, e.g. two hours before the sun sets. If you go in the late afternoon, REVERSE steps 4 and 5.
Please read this whole section before heading out to the field. Data to record is in bold.
Your task is to:
1. Prepare to collect data: Print out the data collection sheet, or download it on your device to record raw data. You will be recording a lot more data than you will ultimately enter into the Google Form – you will have to collect it first, do some averaging and totaling to aggregate the data, and then enter your aggregated data.
2. Select a location. It should be on land, with fairly consistent habitat characteristics on the scale of about a city block or ~150m in each direction. For example, you can pick a residential neighborhood with a mix of yards and houses, but try not to choose one that ends nearby and transitions to redwood forest. That will lead to confusing data. To estimate distance at this stage, you can pace off: http://www.backcountryattitude.com/pacing.html.
a. Choose one of the following to characterize your location and record it: urban, suburban, park, grassland/ field, shrubland, forest, or other. If “other,” say what in the notes area.
3. Establish your study circle. You will estimate a circle 50m in diameter by:
a. Establishing a center point (put down a rock, backpack, scarf, etc. to mark it). If you have a device with a Maps app, drop a pin at this location so you can go back or extract more information about it later.
b. Measuring 25m in each of the cardinal directions (N,S,E,W) from the center point. Your (or your borrowed) iPhone or iPad’s utilities include a compass, you can download Compass for Android or for Windows, or you can use an actual compass. Don’t worry about declination (correcting for true north vs. magnetic north). To measure distance, you can use Distance Meter Free for Apple devices, Pedometer for Android, RunMaster Pedometer for Windows, any other pedometer app, and possibly some simple math to sort out the 25m part. Or you can pace it; less precise but workable. Put down something visible – an easy-to-relocate rock, hat, whatever – at the end of the 25m. If there are things like houses in the way, you can still make this work – you will just have to improvise to estimate the straight-line distance while going around the obstacle.
4. Measure the bird community. We are going to use point counts, a simple way to characterize how many birds, and how many different kinds of birds, are in your location. This consists of you standing in the center of your circle, and recording each bird you see during a fixed observation period. You have to be looking around constantly so that you don’t miss birds behind you. Because these are intense, you will do three 5-minute observation periods with 2- to 5-minute breaks in between them. For each,
a. Stand in the middle of your circle. You now have some idea of where its edges are because you just mapped out your NSEW lines (which you will use below). Record the time and the weather (temperature if you have a device and can look up the current temp in your city; and rain/cloudy/partly cloudy/sunny).
b. Get ready, then start a 5-minute timer, or else use a stopwatch, or wait for your watch or clock to sweep through zero seconds and keep track. A timer allows you to focus most on spotting birds since it will beep when you have to stop.
c. Every time you see a new bird (don’t worry about birds flying by high overhead, like gulls headed to sea at skyscraper height), add it to your tally and record it as either within 50m (in the circle) or beyond 50m. In addition, count it as a new species if it’s one you have not yet seen in ANY of the observation bouts, so that you are keeping a tally of the cumulative number of different kinds (“morphospecies”) of birds you have seen throughout all your observations. At the end of your three bouts, you will have tallies for <50m and>50m of number of individual birds, and total number of bird types you have seen. At the end of the third point count bout, note your end time.
5. Measure habitat structure and land use change along each of your cardinal lines, from the center of the circle to the edge. You can use paces or your app to go 5m at a time from the center out in each direction. This means you will be recording at 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25m from your centerpoint, in each direction, for a total of 20 points. At each 5m interval on each line, you will record:
a. Substrate where you are standing – soil, sand, rock (anything from gravel to boulders), pavement, structure (e.g. house, building) or other. If you are actually standing on two things, go with what’s under your right big toe.
b. Trees or shrubs taller than you, within a 2m radius all around you (hint: your wingspan is, on average, ~2 inches more than your height, so you can sort out how to use it to measure this quickly): record either 0 or a count of how many have their main stem (i.e. trunk) within that radius.
c. Low vegetation within that 2m radius, in two categories: up to your knees (roughly 0.5m), and up to your height (roughly 1.5-2m). Estimate whether in that 2m radius circle the percent cover of each vegetation category is 0, 1-25, 26-75, or 76-100. In your datasheet, enter 0, 13, 50, or 88 rather than the range for each of those four categories so that the data can be analyzed directly as numbers.
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