[obol] Filtering birds based on conservations status (was: Credibility (shorter & less rambling version))
- From: Joel Geier <joel.geier@xxxxxxxx>
- To: Tom Crabtree <tc@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 18:52:45 -0700
Hi Tom (& everyone else who didn't click on the "delete" key quite yet),
Great to hear of this initiative on your part. I hope that other
regional reviewers will do the same thing.
Really, I would like to see a uniform approach on this issue all across
Oregon, and better yet, continent-wide. As an attorney, I expect that
you've given some thought to how eBird records might potentially end up
being used in court cases if, say, an anti-conservation group such as
the Pacific Legal Foundation brings up a challenge to some future ESA
listing decision.
The best policy would be a top-down Quality Assurance/Quality Control
program, starting in Sapsucker Woods, that is designed to hold up in the
most adversarial of court cases. I haven't seen anything even
approaching that yet. But in the interim, regional reviewers like
yourself can at least help to ensure that "false positives" don't
artificially inflate population estimates for species or subspecies that
are in real trouble.
I appreciate your initiative on Willow Flycatchers even if it has cost
you some flak. I encourage all of the other eBird reviewers to take a
look through the birds in this list:
http://www.fws.gov/oregonfwo/species/Data/Default.asp
and upgrade your filter settings for all of these birds that could
reasonably be misidentified by birders of beginning -to- middling
experience. This is far more important than screening out the next
erroneous report of a female Tufted Duck, or a Common Yellowthroat that
shows up in Gaston on March 28th.
I'm also guessing that it will be easier to explain this to birders from
a conservation standpoint, versus some of the other reasons why eBird
reviewers ask for details. Hopefully just about everyone can appreciate
the need for getting it right, when we're talking about birds that are
at risk of disappearing.
Happy birding,
Joel
On Tue, 2014-07-08 at 13:58 -0800, Tom Crabtree wrote:
> I think Joel did a great job of explaining the concept of “rarities”
> within the context of Ebird and BirdNotes and similar databases. As a
> regional reviewer for Ebird (Deschutes, Crook & Jefferson Counties) I
> see a lot of merit in his suggestion to monitor some species that are
> rare from a conservation standpoint and not from a statewide or range
> standpoint. This is easily done by local reviewers. We all have
> access to the filters that Ebird uses. Getting them to be accurate
> and meaningful is a constant work in progress. I have set some
> filters to zero for the county because of birds that are severely
> declining locally.
>
>
>
> Willow Flycatcher is one such bird in Deschutes. I have received a bit
> of blow back on this from people, particularly when I ask how they
> separated it from Western Wood-Pewee and the other empids found in the
> region. But when locals only find a handful of birds in migration and
> virtually no breeding birds, it makes sense to change the filter to
> “0” for sensitive species so we can better keep track of them.
>
>
>
> Tom Crabtree, Bend
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