Some ideas from Derek on using eBird to pull out the data you need for the
List Report submission.
-----Original Message-----
From: Derek C. Richardson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 5:45 PM
To: Norm Saunders
Subject: MOS locality report & eBird
For those of you who diligently report your findings on
eBird, and who would like to submit a MOS 2007 locality
report:
http://www.mdbirds.org/birds/mdbirds/locality/grtticks.html
-- scroll to the bottom of the page for the PDF form that
you can e-mail to Norm. Here's a trick you may not
know about...
Although eBird easily shows you your lifelist for a given
state or county, and your current year count, it's not
obvious how to get a year count for an arbitrary year (like
2007, since the current year is now 2008!). Here's how you
do it. Go to the lifelist page (i.e. choose "My eBird" from
the tabs after you log in at www.ebird.org), click either
"My State/Province Lists" or "My County Lists", then click
on the lifelist total for the region of interest. E.g., for
me I could click on the "191" displayed next to "Prince
George's, Maryland". Now edit the URL (the long string of
characters in your browser's address bar; you may need to
click on it and scroll to the right using your arrow key) by
changing "time=life" to "time=year" and adding "&year=2007"
at the end, then press ENTER. Voila! You'll be presented
with a list of all species reported by you in that region in
2007. You can then sort by name/taxonomy, site, or date
first seen that year, if you like. Read off the number of
species by scrolling to the bottom of the list.
WARNING: this is not foolproof. If you're in the habit of
reporting things like "Empidonax sp." or "hawk sp.", be
aware that these ticks are included in the total, so you'll
want to subtract these out. Also, some locales (e.g. on a
pelagic) may not be correctly registered to a given county
-- experiment to find out.
Enjoy!
D
P.S. You can also get a lifelist for a specific location
using eBird, like your backyard. If there's enough
interest, I'll post the trick. Note these tricks come from
the website developers; I'm not clever enough to figure them
out for myself. :)
--
Derek C. Richardson, Laurel, PG County, MD
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~dcr/Archives/Photos/birds.html |