Friday, January 11, 2013

Annual Bird Counts Give Scientists Climate Clues | Essentials

Annual Bird Counts Give Scientists Climate Clues

Hepatic Tanager (Piranga lutea)
Hepatic Tanager (Piranga lutea) by Julian Londono
License (according to Flickr): Attribution-ShareAlike License
Excerpt:

Armed with flashlights, recordings of bird calls, a small notebook and a stash of candy bars, scientist Rich Kostecke embarked on an annual 24-hour Christmastime count of birds along the Texas Gulf Coast. Yellow rail. Barn owl. Bittern. Crested Cara-Cara. Kostecke rattled off the names and scribbled them in his notebook. His data, along with that from more than 50 other volunteers spread out into six groups across the 7,000-acre Mad Island preserve, will be analyzed regionally and then added to a database with the results of more than 2,200 other bird counts going on from mid-December to Jan. 5 across the Western Hemisphere. The count began in 1900 as a National Audubon Society protest of holiday hunts that left piles of bird and animal carcasses littered across the country.

People:

Rich Kostecke

Overall Sentiment: -0.0916668

Relevance: 0.780697

SentimentQuote
-0.402814"Learning the changes of habit in drought could help us know what will happen as it gets warmer and drier," said Kostecke, ...
0.157228"There are several possibilities," Kostecke surmised. ...
0.129124"There are several possibilities," Kostecke surmised. "Conditions may be better in the east, like Louisiana. Some may still be north, because it's been mild, and they tend to follow the freeze line."
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 3
  • Aggregate Sentiment: -0.116462
  • Mean: -0.038820666666667
  • Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Key:

  • Aggregate Sentiment is meant to be an indicator of an individual's overall sentiment.
  • The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
  • The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

Additional Info:

GeographicFeature: Texas Gulf Coast

Overall Sentiment: 0.153025

Relevance: 0.429559

GeographicFeature: Mad Island

Overall Sentiment: -0.0164714

Relevance: 0.301376

StateOrCounty: Texas

Overall Sentiment: -0.246528

Relevance: 0.360297

Disambiguation: Location | PoliticalDistrict | AdministrativeDivision | GovernmentalJurisdiction | USStateReferences:
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