BRC goes Open Access
In 2008 Batumi Raptor Count made its first full-season count of migrating raptors along the eastern Black Sea coast. Now, after more than a decade of counts, we are thrilled to announce that the entire BRC dataset, including over 370,000 occurrence records collected between 2008-2017*, has been published open access in GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (Figure 1). What’s more, ZooKeys has published our complementary data paper in which we explain exactly how these data were collected, managed and processed (Figure 2), and how to best use our open data for monitoring and research.
Figure 2. Diagram of data management and processing at BRC showing the data registry development from paper based entries in the beginning to the mobile application supported entries since 2015 with subsequent final data processing and upload to the GBIF database.
With more than one million raptors passing through the Eastern Black Sea Flyway every autumn our counts represent a considerable part of the global breeding populations of several raptor species. Moreover, our counts are one of few data sources concerning the state of raptor populations to the north of the Caucasus. Indeed, we think it is not an exaggeration to say that our citizen science project has now delivered a unique benchmark for monitoring the state of raptor populations in the East African-Eurasian migration system during the 21st century!
An important quality of the BRC dataset is that it not only contains information on abundance. Many records also include information regarding the age and sex of birds, allowing us to dig into the demographic changes underlying trends in species abundance. We already analysed recent changes in abundance and demography for eight common raptor species. That work is currently in review so we can’t share the results with you yet, but hope we can do so later this spring!
Looking further ahead, we believe our dataset can be very useful for anyone looking to study migration behaviour of raptors. So don’t hesitate to get in touch if you are a student or researcher with some cool research ideas!
So far open data is far from common practice among bird observatories. However, at Batumi Raptor Count we firmly believe in open data as an integral part of transparent and reproducible science, and we very much hope these publications will inspire our colleagues monitoring bird migration elsewhere to consider a similar approach.
By publishing a data paper we transparently identify key pitfalls in the use of our data. Any third party that wishes to use our data is advised to consult this data paper, and preferably the BRC research coordinator, before using BRC monitoring data for any other specific use. The count strategy of BRC is tailored to local conditions and flight behaviour of raptors in the bottleneck. When using our dataset you cannot just simply add up all numbers to determine daily or annual species totals. One pitfall is that for some species, such as spotted eagles and ringtail harriers, a large number of individuals cannot be identified to species level in the field, and are thus recorded as, for example, ‘Large Eagle Spec.’ or ‘MonPalHen’ (Figure 3 & 4).
Figure 3. Ageing of female Harriers can be challenging and distant birds can be hard to distinguish from juvenile birds under poor visibility. Thus, we record birds as female colored, when they appear to be either in juvenile or female plumage.
Figure 4. Hierarchy of morphological groups used to estimate how many of the ‘unidentified birds’ belong to each species level, shown only for target species at BRC.
We realise these pitfalls complicate the use and arguably restrict the openness of our data. However, we developed scripts in the open source software R to estimate daily and annual species totals from the GBIF dataset, and these scripts are also published open access via Bitbucket. Users that need simplified tables of daily and annual species totals can request these from the BRC research coordinator.
The publication of the BRC dataset in GBIF and the preparation of the accompanying data paper for Zookeys was supported in large part by NLBIF, the Dutch branch of GBIF. We are very grateful to Frank de Miranda and the Dutch Georgian Ornithological Foundation for their help in getting this project going.
* 2018 data will follow as soon as possible. The dataset in GBIF will be updated annually.
Citation
Wehrmann, J., de Boer, F., Benjumea, R., Cavaillès, S., Engelen, D., Jansen, J., Verhelst, B. & Vansteelant, W.M.G. (2019). Batumi Raptor Count: autumn raptor migration count data from the Batumi bottleneck, Republic of Georgia. ZooKeys. doi:10.3897/zookeys.836.29252
On social media
We are very passionate about communicating what we do. Did you know you can follow us on both Facebook and Twitter ? BRC co-founder Wouter Vansteelant recently posted a thread on Twitter providing some background information to the data paper and dataset. Start from the tweet below, or click here.
Turns out our dataset is a sizeable addition to the Georgian records in GBIF.
