Week 1 & 2 Journal Entry - Winter 2022

The first weeks of the bird-window collision internship have involved conducting a literature review with my peers. Our first meeting was around understanding the nature of our bird-window collision project and why Dr. Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela has chosen to pursue this question. The overall format of this internship will involve a number of small group discussions around core literature that Ocampo-Peñuela believes will be core for understanding the question of ‘why and how do birds collide with windows?’. I have been assigned the discussion about a 2016 scientific paper titled, Patterns of bird-window collisions inform migration on a university campus, led by Natalia at Duke University. This experiment is around understanding the effect of preventative methods, like UV reflective films, on windows. I will be doing an even more in-depth analysis of the paper before our meeting this upcoming week. The format of how I would like to lead the discussion around the Ocampo-Peñuela, 2016 paper is by creating connections between our team’s base knowledge around birds and ornithology and the protocol listed out in the experiment.

My role in this internship and project is, carcass survey protocol and data sheet entry: build a protocol for collision surveys to take place every quarter in a standardized manner, including building selection and project website. I am working on my organizational skills regarding projects and I am most excited about the opportunity to apply to the organization and be thorough with this research project. These last few weeks I have been thinking about the way that we will format the data and what kinds of aspects will be most important to our project here at UCSC. One thing that I know we will need to reflect on are the buildings that we will choose for surveying. Some buildings that I have looked at and considered for this project include Humanities 1 or 2, Social Sciences 1 or 2, the International Living Center, Porter House College A or B, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and McHenry Library. All of the prior are multi-floor buildings with many windows and varying surrounding environments. It would also be important to compare how many square feet the buildings are, in total, and potentially categorize them by their relative square footage (Hagar et al., 2017). I think there are other potentially smaller buildings around campus that might act as a control for our surveying.

When considering the protocol for our survey methods, I am hoping to create a very simple procedure regarding data collection and input into our data sets. Dr. Natalia wants to use inaturalist as a potential input for the data sets. I am thinking that if we use inaturalist, we might be able to include the links to posts into a google form that auto-populates a google sheet. Dr. Natalia was interested in making a group of some sort on inaturalist that can be shared with the entire school as a passive form of data collection throughout the entire campus community because the app automatically sets coordinates a data point’s location. Thinking about the sustainability of this project, interns could potentially be responsible for placing posts from inaturalist into a useable data spread format.

Something I am interested in and want to bring up to our team during the next meeting is the distinction between migrating and local birds and to what extent we want our study to focus on this distinction. Jared et al., 2020 utilizes RADAR techniques to identify migratory bird populations and how they change the number of bird-window collisions. This could be a very interesting thing to apply to our study and would be a seasonal aspect.