Ontario forest birds at risk program (FBAR)

Data Rescue Intern: Kennedy Zwarych

In the Winter of 2024, I was privileged to complete a data rescue internship for the Ontario Forest Birds at Risk (OFBAR) program within Birds Canada. From approximately 1971 to 2017, OFBAR was collecting data on rare and at-risk birds without a standardized survey protocol. This data was a combination of incidental observations, property walk-throughs, and irregularly timed point counts. My first task was to collect, clean and combine all information into a usable format that then could be uploaded to a data portal called NatureCounts. NatureCounts allows visitors to interact with one of the largest datasets of birds worldwide. It hosts data from bird banding, bird monitoring and also citizen based bird surveillance programs. Luckily for me, there are clearly outlined formats that data must fit into before being uploaded to NatureCounts.

Photo from Birds Canada website

From 2018 and onward, a well-defined method was used for collecting data via timed point counts and incidental observations between those point counts. OFBAR is building software that can convert their field data directly into the NatureCounts format in order to streamline their data archiving. The NatureCounts format has over 150 fields to record metrics and descriptors for one individual bird observation, so developing this software has been a priority for the OFBAR team recently. Between 2018 and 2023, field biologists trialled different ways of recording point counts and occupancy data; my second task was to wrangle this data into a format that was able to efficiently be transformed into the NatureCounts standard.

​The most interesting challenge of this internship was deciding how species at risk observations should be masked. How large of an area should be blurred? Also, how do you create an area to blur without the observation being at the centre point? Some surveys were also on private property, and in the past, some enthusiastic birders have been known to wander to check a “lifer” off their list. Our solution was to report the lower left corner of a 10km by 10km square that the observation was somewhere within by changing the last digits of UTM coordinates to zeros.

This work would not have been completed without the help of Sandra Emry, Bruno Soares, Samreen Munim, Brendan Boyd and Catherine Jardine. Many thanks to you all for your patience and encouragement, it’s truly appreciated. Another dataset preserved – woohoo!