From the journal Nature--yet another of many possible uses for eBird data
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Published online 10 August 2010 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2010.395
Birds flock online
Supercomputer time will help ornithologists make ecological sense of
millions of records of bird sightings.
http://www.nature.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/news/2010/100810/full/news.2010.395.html
by Emma Marris
Midway through a birding expedition last May off the Louisiana coast,
Donna Dittmann lost her footing and broke her leg. Unaware of this,
she kept the weight off her swollen ankle while surveying birds the
next day at an unnamed islet that was packed with nesting pelicans,
egrets and terns. After she returned home, a visit to the emergency
room revealed the extent of her injury. Her husband, Steven Cardiff,
who, like Dittman, is a collections manager at the Louisiana State
University Museum of Natural Science in Baton Rouge, dubbed the islet
'Fractured Fibula Island' in her honour. He then he went online and
added the species they had seen there to 'eBird'.
A database that records the vast numbers of sightings routinely made
by dedicated birders around the globe, eBird has been growing steadily
since it's launch in 2002. More than 48 million observations have been
entered so far — 10 million of them in 2010 alone. The data represent
millions of hours of eye-straining — and sometimes leg-breaking —
observations.
According to Steve Kelling, director of information science at the
Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York, who runs the project
together with the New York-based National Audubon Society, "the
challenge now is to try to do something meaningful with all these
data".
Fortunately, eBird has just been given some powerful help. Last week
Kelling learned that the project has been awarded 100,000 hours on the
US National Science Foundation's TeraGrid supercomputer. By performing
intensive data analysis using the supercomputer, Kelling and his
colleagues hope to turn the scattered observations of each bird
species into a global view of its movements.
The eBird team will start by combining the bird sightings with remote
sensing information from sources such as the Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS) on board NASA's Terra and Aqua
satellites. Among the data that can be gleaned from MODIS is precisely
when different places on Earth are 'greening up' in the spring — a
seasonal phenomenon that can be strongly correlated with bird
movement.
A computer model based on eBird data recreates the spring migration of
the indigo bunting.Daniel Fink, eBird
The computers will then 'learn' what kind of land cover, what timing
pattern of greening and what human densities best predict bird
presence, and generate a million more simulated observations for each
species: points where it is predicted to be either present or absent
at different times throughout the year. The result is an animated map
of bird movements. An early model of the movements of the indigo
bunting (Passerina cyanea), a songbird that winters in the tropics,
took five days to run on the lab's own computers. But the
visualization was compelling, showing how the birds first made
landfall at or near the Mississippi Delta and then used the river
system to find their way to northern forests (see animation). "This
shows how important the Gulf coast is early on in the migration," says
Kelling.
With TeraGrid, the Cornell lab plans to marry such models to scenarios
for climate change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
in hopes of predicting migratory changes — and perhaps extinctions —
for hundreds of species. The lab could theoretically do the same work
on many smaller computers, perhaps relying on a 'cloud' of laptops
belonging to their birding volunteers, according to David Anderson,
director of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
(BOINC) at the University of California, Berkeley. Kelling says they
may — some day. "We don't have the infrastructure or the expertise now
to figure out the issues of parsing all the data out," he says.
These ecological problems are a new frontier for supercomputing, says
John Cobb, a principal investigator for TeraGrid at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee and a co-investigator for DataONE, a
project sponsored by the National Science Foundation to gather and
harmonize ecological and environmental data sets. With vast amounts of
computing power comes the opportunity to turn the work of many amateur
birders into a nuanced portrait of how species migrate. "It is a
wonderful story about how they have used all those people who are
enthusiastic about birdwatching and made a scientifically significant
data set," says Cobb.
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Dave Slager
Graduate Student
Terrestrial Wildlife Ecology Lab
School of Environment and Natural Resources
The Ohio State University
210 Kottman Hall, 2021 Coffey Road
Columbus, OH 43210-1085
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