New York Breeding Bird Atlas

Examination of Populations of the Bicknell’s Thrush (Catharus Bicknelli) in New York State

Nick Hepler, University at Albany, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Objectives

This project examines populations of the Bicknell’s thrush (Catharus bicknelli) using data from the First & Second Atlases of Breeding Birds of New York. The data documents the distribution of the state’s avifauna during two distinct time periods: 1980-1985 and 2000-2005. Over 4,300 individuals submitted data during the first atlas yielding a final, cumulative dataset of over 361,583 records. Over 1,200 individuals submitted data for the second atlas project, resulting in a final database of 519,570 records. The objective of this project is to study changes in the bird’s population, breeding status, and habitat preferences.

The objective of the author was to utilize the R language and environment for statistical computing and graphics to create a reproducible research project. The project employed Hadley Wickham’s tidyverse; a collection of R packages and principles as outlined in the R for Data Science book. The project performs the following steps with the data:

1. Import
2. Tidy
3. Tranform
4. Visualize

The final report was written using R Markdown from RStudio.

Source Data

The following resources concerning the raw data are provided through the New York State Open Data website:

• Breeding Bird Atlas Data
• Breeding Bird Atlas Data Overview
• Breeding Bird Atlas Data Dictionary

Citations