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hi folks,
Great topic Richard/Ian and something I think a number of people might be
interested in (well, I am!).
Folks writing sections for the NS Birds Magazine (NSBS quarterly) are very
familiar with this too - trying to parse and collate data from each of
these venues.
One part, philosophical, one part technical, one part quality control, one
part privacy...
*One venue or many?*
Encouraging people to use a single mechanism for reporting - like eBird -
could go a long way, but there is still a large percentage of people that
might never go that route and prefer more social mechanisms like Facebook
and naturens (not that naturens is social media - just that it hosts
discussion as well) where a lot of great sightings are posted. Arguably, a
more-critical mass of people could be encouraged/convinced to eBird, but
with ever-increasing options for reporting/discussing sightings (listservs,
social media apps, eBird, websites, photo sites) I doubt we would ever
approach too-near-unanimity with a single mechanism.
A couple years ago I mapped the Indigo Bunting fallout (2012?) and the
distribution/spread of Red-bellied Woodpeckers in the province - about
20-30% of sightings from NS-RBA and naturens had made it to eBird. And, I
believe it was around 50% of Snowy Owl sightings made it to eBird this year.
Alternatively, instead of, or as well as, trying to encourage people to
submit to eBird (or whichever central repository), another approach could
be to make it easy for people to get email messages and facebook posts *into
*eBird. I think Richard and others are right that no one has time to report
sightings on several different sites. The approach here would be *PARSING*,
where when a user posts to facebook or naturens, they have the option to
also submit this as a record to eBird (etc) - the message would be parsed
behind the scenes to extract the relevant info, the user reviews/modifies,
and clicks submit and it goes to eBird.
On Facebook or Flicker, this could work via a third party app...that
doesn't exist yet, that I know of...when you post, you have the option to
"eBird this post" - any developers in the house?
On listservs, this could work with a little bit of parsing code, e.g., on
the html messages at http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Environment/FNSN/MList/ (I
have started this, but have about as much time as Richard). If parsed well,
the details of the sighting could be exported into a format amenable to
eBird's upload-from-file portal.
When doing this, the same questions of data quality arise as with current
eBird data...and this would have to be balanced against the value accrued
by the additional records. But there are ways to assign confidence to
observations, just like we do manually when reviewing reports.
I imagine this is a problem that more and more people will face in the
years to come. Since it will become harder and harder to parse information
from all these various sources, manually, my perspective is that an
automated solution (with review) will be most sustainable.
would be happy to be part of a solution-finding party...
cheers,
James
On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 2:13 PM, Richard Stern <sternrichard@gmail.com>wrot=
e:
>
>
> This brings up a more general point. At present, bird sightings and photos
> in NS are being reported to NatureNS, NS-RBA, the NSBS Facebook page, and
> EBird, or any, but rarely all, of the above. So it's easy to miss stuff if
> you don't spend the time monitoring all those sources. It's hard enough f=
or
> a casual observer, and must be doubly hard for someone trying to collate
> data for a project, or the NSBS magazine etc. If I had the time (which
> hopefully I might in the few years) I would offer to try and coordinate
> this stuff into, say, a daily digest in the NSBS web site or Facebook pag=
e,
> or RSS feed, but does anyone have any other thoughts or the time to do it?
>
> Richard
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Ian McLaren <I.A.McLaren@dal.ca> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> AlL:
>>
>>
>> Those who don't monitor the NS Bird Sociey's Facebook site (even every
>> 2 or 3 days) will miss what has become, for better or worse,the only sou=
rce
>> of some unusual sightings. In the last few days, these have included an
>> Little Blue Heron photo'd 23 Mar. at Round Bay, Shel. Co. (Laurel Marie
>> Amirault), an American Bittern photo'd at Hemeons Head, Shel. Co., and a
>> photo'd Snow Goose with Canadas 23 Mar. near Truro (Kate Messer). There
>> have also been a number of first spring arrivals there.
>>
>>
>> It would be helpful of such 'good' birds could also be reported on
>> NatureNS and/or NS-RBA.
>>
>>
>> Cheers, Ian McLaren
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> #################
> Richard Stern,
> Port Williams, NS, Canada
> sternrichard@gmail.com
> ###################
>
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