Location and land cover uncertainty associated with stop-level data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS)

Dates

Publication Date: 2024-08-20
Start Date: 2001-01-01
End Date: 2019-12-30

Citation

Burner, R.C., Kirschbaum, A., Anich, N.M., Niemuth, N.D., Striegel, E.D., and Thogmartin, W.E., 2024, Location and land cover uncertainty associated with stop-level data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P1CLSQED.

Summary

The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) (https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/) has counted birds annually for over fifty-five years. Survey 'routes' each consist of 50 'stops' (point counts) placed along a route path. Inter-stop distances and stop locations can vary from route to route and from year to year, and precise locations of each stop are not typically recorded. This data set (and the associated R script) includes quantified uncertainty in BBS annual point count locations using digitized estimates of stop locations from the central United States. It also includes the necessary components to calculate the resulting land cover uncertainty for each annual point count (i.e., stop) and facilitates incorporation of this uncertainty [...]

Summary

The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) (https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/) has counted birds annually for over fifty-five years. Survey 'routes' each consist of 50 'stops' (point counts) placed along a route path. Inter-stop distances and stop locations can vary from route to route and from year to year, and precise locations of each stop are not typically recorded. This data set (and the associated R script) includes quantified uncertainty in BBS annual point count locations using digitized estimates of stop locations from the central United States. It also includes the necessary components to calculate the resulting land cover uncertainty for each annual point count (i.e., stop) and facilitates incorporation of this uncertainty into Bayesian multi-species hierarchical models to predict stop-level BBS bird detections. It can be used to repeat the authors' analyses, or to produce additional analyses of BBS data from other regions, for other bird species, or for other covariates. Files in this dataset include (1) spatial coordinates of autogenerated points placed every 40 m along BBS routes in the central United States ('Autogenerated_BBS_points.csv'), (2) the autogenerated point number nearest each digitized estimate of BBS route-stop-year combination (although the year is typically unknown; 'BBS_stops_nearest_autogen_point.csv'), (3) location uncertainty along BBS route paths of BBS stops by stop number, in terms both of autogenerated point numbers and route path distance ('BBS_stop_location_uncertainty.csv'), (4) locations and nearest autogenerated point numbers for some BBS stop locations that were recorded using GPS in known years ('WI_GPS_BBS_stops.csv'), and (5) a series of land cover habitat summary files (one for each relevant year) for BBS routes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan that summarizes land cover within a 400 m radius of each autogenerated point on these routes (e.g., 'habSubset_nlcd_2004.csv'). Land cover classes are based on merged cover classes from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). This data set can best be understood in the context of the associated R code (https://doi.org/10.5066/P1HY6LDF) and manuscript.

Contacts

Point of Contact :: Ryan C Burner, U.S. Geological Survey, MIDCONTINENT REGION
Originator :: Ryan C. Burner, Alan Kirschbaum, Nicholas M. Anich, Neal D. Niemuth, Eli D. Striegel, Wayne E. Thogmartin
Metadata Contact :: Ryan C Burner, U.S. Geological Survey, MIDCONTINENT REGION
Publisher :: U.S. Geological Survey
Distributor :: U.S. Geological Survey - ScienceBase
SDC Data Owner :: Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center
USGS Mission Area :: Ecosystems

Attached Files

Click on title to download individual files attached to this item.

BBS_stop_level_METADATA.xml Original FGDC Metadata	View	71.47 KB	application/fgdc+xml
Autogenerated_BBS_points.csv		44.6 MB	text/csv
BBS_stop_location_uncertainty.csv		325.71 KB	text/csv
BBS_stops_nearest_autogen_point.csv		408.91 KB	text/csv
WI_GPS_BBS_stops.csv		43.09 KB	text/csv
habSubset_nlcd_2004.csv		30.28 MB	text/csv
habSubset_nlcd_2008.csv		30.27 MB	text/csv
habSubset_nlcd_2011.csv		30.23 MB	text/csv
habSubset_nlcd_2013.csv		30.09 MB	text/csv
habSubset_nlcd_2016.csv		30.1 MB	text/csv

Related External Resources

Type: webLink

Software	https://doi.org/10.5066/P1HY6LDF

Purpose

These data were collected to quantify estimates of location and land cover uncertainty associated with stop-level bird data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) (https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/). It can be used to understand, interpret, or analyze these uncertainties. Note that these uncertainties likely vary by region and so these data will be most applicable within the region covered by the data release. Users of this data release (and associated R code: https://doi.org/10.5066/P1HY6LDF) could, for example, use our autogenerated point locations along BBS route paths in the central United States to produce their own habitat (i.e., land cover) estimates as desired. They could then use our stop location uncertainty distributions to estimate habitat uncertainty for each BBS stop and include this uncertainty in models. It is important to note that BBS estimated stop locations included in this data release are estimates based on e.g., observer notes and stop descriptions and do not represent BBS data products. The location of annual point counts, and the associations between annual counts and a given stop number, cannot be assumed to be consistent from year to year. Locations and stop numbers often vary through time, and the survey year(s) associated with most estimated stop locations in this dataset is unknown. Therefore, digitized estimates of stop locations included here should be used only to quantify variation in stop locations among routes. They cannot be assumed to be associated with BBS bird count data from a given year. They are most appropriately used in aggregate, e.g., to quantify uncertainty.

Location and land cover uncertainty associated with stop-level data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS)

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