Proposal Overview
Topic Summary
Figure 2: Map from 2024 study of Black-breasted Parrotbill in Northeast India showing current potential range of Black-breasted Parrotbill in the study extent showing https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/orhu-2024-0003
The main question that we are going to answer is: What factors should be considered when deciding where to build a bird sanctuary in Colorado?
We will determine this by identifying the relationships between the number of bird sightings in the past 5 years and its relationship to temperature, precipitation, wind speeds, humidity, natural disaster occurrence, and urban population.
This question matters for bird conservation and ecosystem protection, and, while our scope is limited to the United States, this question and the work that follows to answer it can be extrapolated to apply to other parts of the world as well. In fact, similar studies have been conducted in Taiwan and Northern India.
Our plan for a high-level analysis would be to gather data from publicly available sources (eBird, NCEI, FEMA, ACS, USGS). We will do data cleaning and preprocessing and then we will search for patterns. When searching for patterns, we will use clustering for geographic hotspots and bird species. We will use regression to determine which variables are related to bird sightings. We will also predict if a species will be present in geographic areas due to changes in the aforementioned variables.
Research Questions
Figure 3: Two figures from 2017 study on Shifts in Bird Migration Timing https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2017/6025646
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What are the bird hotspots in Colorado during each of the four seasons?
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Which Counties have witnessed the greatest change in bird count over time?
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What is the relationship between average temperature per season and number of birds?
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Can we predict the impact of natural disasters on bird population counts?
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Can we predict the impact of urban development on bird population counts?
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Does the amount of precipitation per year impact the number of birds in a region?
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Is there any significant shift in annual fluctuation of bird population counts that indicate a shift in migration timelines?
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Which bird species appear to be threatened / are at risk of becoming endangered?
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How has the prevalence of different species of birds changed over time?
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What are the typical flight patterns of different bird species?​
Figure 4: figure from 2024 study on biodiversity hotspots in Taiwan showing hotspots for waterbirds