Multimedia Gallery - Computational sustainability techniques help predict bird population abundances across the U.S.

animation showing north AMerica map with predicted tree swallows population abundance

April 19, 2016

Computational sustainability techniques help predict bird population abundances across the U.S.

This animation is an example of the application of computational sustainability techniques for predicting population abundances across broad spatial and temporal scales. The animation shows the annual cycle of the entire tree swallow population. The "hotter" the color, the higher relative abundance of the population at that location. This visualization allows us to see how tree swallows migrate across the continent and to identify the most important regions during each phase of the journey. In the winter, tree swallows concentrate into distinct eastern and western sub-populations. As the spring migration begins, these populations explode northward and expand across the entire continent into their breeding grounds. The fall migration proceeds at a more leisurely pace as the populations return south, separating, and then concentrating into the Central Valley of California, the lower Mississippi River valley and Florida. The animation was produced using the Spatio-Temporal Exploratory Model to predict population abundances across broad spatial and temporal scales. By relating local environmental features derived from NASA remote sensing data to observations of species from eBird (eBird.org), a citizen science program run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the model can discover complex spatio-temporal patterns and make predictions at unsampled locations and times.

Credit: Daniel Fink, Cornell Lab. of Ornithology

Images credited to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, are in the public domain. The images were created by employees of the United States Government as part of their official duties or prepared by contractors as "works for hire" for NSF. You may freely use NSF-credited images and, at your discretion, credit NSF with a "Courtesy: National Science Foundation" notation.

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