Week 4 Journal Entry - Winter Quarter

This week as I begin to formulate ideas about our survey protocol for the UCSC bird-window collision project, I become curious about the mediums that would best preserve the information to be presented while maintaining a degree of autonomy in the future, after I depart from this project. Hager and Consantino (2014) of course have created a very well-cited and thorough collection of artifacts on their website that maintains the overall reproducibility protocol for the surveys that were conducted in Continent-wide analysis of how urbanization affects bird-window collision mortality in North America (2017). I want to make sure that UCSC has a specific form of this protocol to be referenced over the length of this study while making sure not to reinvent the wheel. I sure do not have time for this.

Choosing buildings is our next big task to do, as a team. Hager and Constantino (2014) make sure that there are various specific variables kept in mind for this selection that includes the stratification of buildings by size and keeping track of constants like building’s distance from each other and relative surrounding vegetation. As our team talked about in the last meeting, we are interested in the fact that UCSC has varying ecosystems throughout the campus, we want to make sure to capture this variable in our building selection. It makes sense that we would need to have each ecosystem listed out, choosing buildings that are out of vegetation and that are in dense vegetation, and small, medium, and large in size. At the last meeting, we also decided to split the map of the University campus into parts, as starting points for our interested building search.

I feel a lot more comfortable with the understanding of the protocol and how to present the information to my cohort and students that will participate after me, once I found the Hager and Consantino (2014) webpage. I also appreciate that Natalia did not start me off with this huge resource. It would have focused me on the protocol a lot quicker, but I really appreciated the time I had searching through the topic of bird-window collisions and how it lead me through various formats of this field of study. I do feel a bit nervous about the kinds of analysis being conducted for the projects before ours and to what extent I can participate in this. I have some degree of coding data information in R and Stata which could be some benefit, but I have little-to-no experience in Java or Python. I would be excited to learn more about these but I also realize my time is limited.

I am excited to begin the process of asking the administration for permission to use various buildings for this experience because I have a lot of experience working with and coordinating needs with administrators. I learned this through my work on a project with student leaders called Slug Shelter. We have a goal of establishing a student-run shelter for students in the Santa Cruz area who are homeless or housing insecure. To do this, we collaborate with students in various majors, departments, and interests while making sure to align with our project’s mission. We have had meetings with administrators at the vice-chancellor level and are not ready to put our goal down anytime soon. For the most part, with the Slug Shelter project, we work against what the administration’s goals are but the bird-window collision project will be a refreshing project where leaders at the university will most likely align more. I think one of the first steps to moving forward with this is getting the approval and support of the natural resource reserve manager of the UCSC campus reserve. Regardless of whether or not we use buildings that are specifically a part of the campus reserve, it would be nice to have this support from someone with extended experience with the land.

Beginning the process of creating the Inaturalist website was also pretty fun because I quickly realized that this was something I could tap into other projects for inspiration quite easily too. I first looked at the project being done at LSU (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/lsu-bird-window-collision-monitoring-project) which helped me create the about section of the UCSC project. Rules of the projects are listed in the about section and thus can help anyone interested in the project. I do not see many projects linking their protocol to the Inaturalist project and I am interested in doing so. I added the Norris Center Logo for the project sponsor because it is awesome that we are starting this project on the 50 year anniversary with their sponsorship – shoutout to their current Director, Chris Lay, renowned generalist!

For this week’s internship meeting, we decided to go on a walk around campus to talk about our respective work in the bird-window collision project. We walked down toward the McHenry library and talked about our interests in statistical methods and how we understand their use in a project like ours. We mentioned that there is no simple method of codifying the idea of our micro-climates and diverse ecosystem on UCSC property. This presents itself as an issue for a project like ours because unlike insects or other small terrestrial creatures that our survey methods could move (supposedly) quicker than, birds will be flying while we conduct our surveys and be moving throughout the campus. It was nice to walk around and talk about statistical methods because doing statistical analysis and preparing for the kind of data structure and collection that will be relevant for statistical analysis can be pretty time-consuming and inside work. Getting the chance to go outside and let ideas about a common goal flow freely is a great opportunity for a team like ours. We walked and thought about the building construction around campus and how different architectural techniques used around the campus to accommodate buildings in the diverse terrain will affect our study. Some things that come to mind are the different ground levels of some buildings, different amounts of glass, and the surrounding environments of said buildings.