Using Artificial Intelligence to Track Birds’ Dark-of-Night Migrations

Posted on September 24, 2019 by India Stephenson

Below is a press release about the Methods in Ecology and Evolution article ‘MistNet: Measuring historical bird migration in the US using archived weather radar data and convolutional neural networks‘ taken from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Wood thrush. ©CheepShot

On many evenings during spring and fall migration, tens of millions of birds take flight at sunset and pass over our heads, unseen in the night sky. Though these flights have been recorded for decades by the National Weather Services’ network of constantly-scanning weather radars, until recently these data have been mostly out of reach for bird researchers.

“That’s because the sheer magnitude of information and lack of tools to analyse it made only limited studies possible,” says artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Dan Sheldon at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Continue reading →

Inferring Extinction: When is a Species as Dead as a Dodo?

Posted on March 9, 2016 by India Stephenson

Post provided by ELIZABETH BOAKES

The indisputably extinct Dodo (Raphus cucullatus). ©Ballista

A species is either extant or extinct – it exists or it does not exist. Black and white, a binary choice. Surely it should not be difficult to assign species to one of these two categories? Well, in practice it can be extremely challenging and a plethora of methods have been developed to deal with the problem. This of course leads to a second challenge – which of the plethora should you use?! (More on this later…)

There are a few well-studied cases where we can assert extinction confidently. For example, the chances of the Dodo (Raphus cucullatus) having existed undetected for upwards of 300 years on an island now densely populated by humans are infinitesimally small. However, many extinctions are far harder to diagnose. Species typically become extremely rare before becoming extinct. If taxa are particularly cryptic or are found across a huge geographic range it is quite plausible that the few remaining individuals may exist undetected for decades. An extreme illustration of this is the 1938 discovery of Latimeria chalumnae, a deep-sea member of the Coelacanths, the entire order of which was believed to have become extinct 80 million years earlier! Continue reading →

Revealing Biodiversity on Rocky Reefs using Natural Soundscapes

Posted on March 8, 2016 by India Stephenson

Post Provided by SYDNEY HARRIS

The Biodiversity Struggle

Typical rocky reef habitat in north east New Zealand, characterized by encrusting red algae and Kelp forest. ©Sydney Harris

By now we’re all familiar with the global biodiversity crisis: increasing numbers of species extinct or at risk of extinction; widespread habitat loss and a seemingly endless set of political, logistical and financial obstacles hampering swift action for conservation. The international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has set twenty global diversity targets, many of which require participating nations to conduct accurate and efficient monitoring to assess their progress and inform policy decisions. Governing bodies and organizations worldwide have agreed that immediate, efficient action is essential to preserving our planet’s increasingly threatened ecosystems.

But how? Diversity measurement techniques are a tricky business. Accurately recording diversity can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, expensive, invasive and highly susceptible to human error. Often these methods involve the employment of trained specialists to individually identify hundreds or even thousands of species, a process that can take many months to complete.

Marine habitats are particularly difficult to access because of the physical limitations of humans underwater, and are often flawed due to the influence of our presence on marine organisms. However, the oceans contain many of the world’s most diverse systems, and, despite the limitations of current methods, the need to monitor marine diversity is a top priority for the global conservation movement. Continue reading →

Building a Better Indicator

Posted on December 11, 2015 by India Stephenson

Post Provided by Charlie Outhwaite & Nick Isaac

Nick and Charlie are giving a presentation on ‘Biodiversity Indicators from Occurrence Records’ at the BES Annual Meeting on Wednesday 16 December at 13:30 in Moorfoot Hall. Charlie will also be presenting a poster on Tuesday 15 December between 17:00 and 18:30 on ‘Monitoring the UK’s less well-studied species using biological records‘ in the Lennox Suite.

Biodiversity Indicators are some of the most important tools linking ecological data with government policy. Indicators need to summarise large amounts of information in a format that is accessible to politicians and the general public. The primary use of indicators is to monitor progress towards environmental targets. For the UK, a suite of indicators are produced annually which are used to monitor progress towards the Aichi targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity as well as for European Union based commitments. However, this is complicated by the fact that biodiversity policy within the UK is devolved to each of the four nations, so additional indicators have been developed to monitor the commitments of each country.

A range of biodiversity indicators exist within this suite covering the five strategic goals of the Convention; which include addressing the causes of biodiversity loss, reducing pressures on biodiversity and improving status of biodiversity within the UK. Within strategic goal C (improve status of biodiversity by safeguarding ecosystems, species and genetic diversity) there are currently 11 “State” indicators that use species data to monitor progress towards the targets underlying this goal. Most existing species based indicators use abundance data from large scale monitoring schemes with systematic protocols. However, there are other sources of data, such as occurrence records, that can offer an alternative if they are analysed using the appropriate methods. This post will discuss the development of species indicators for occurrence records to complement the current UK species based indicators, specifically relating to the C4b priority species indicator and the D1c pollinators indicator. Continue reading →

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