Methodology

Stage 1: Vancouver Bird and Land Trends

I divided this project into two distinct stages based on my two research goals:

Goal 1: How are bird populations being impacted in Vancouver as the are becomes more urbanized?

Goal 2: Where in Vancouver will birds likely be drawn to? In this urban environment, what conditions will favour bird populations the most?

In the initial stage of this research project I analyzed trends in the Christmas Bird Counts while assessing how the local landscape has changed through time to determine if there was a correlation between urbanization and shifts in bird community composition.

The steps of this first process are:

a) Preparation of Landsat Imagery

After selecting satellite images of the study area I chose to use the earliest and latest years (1999 and 2017) to isolate the land changes and show how urbanization has occurred over that time span. The remotely sensed satellite imagery were displayed by using bands 4, 3 & 2 to get an infrared image.

b) Create NDVI maps for the two time periods

In the image analysis toolbar we used the Normative Difference Vegetation Index function to visualize how vegetation covered the city at these two time periods. Once this was complete I made a comparison map of the two images.

c) Analyze the Christmas Bird Counts

After trimming the data set to show bird counts between years 1976-2016, I then organized the Christmas Bird Counts into four categories of Birds:

Ocean Birds (ducks, geese, caramind)
Common Birds (crows, ravens and pigeons)
Predators (eagles, falcons and hawks)
In Land (swallows, steller’s jay and chickadees)

d) Show trends that are occurring

I then summarized the yearly counts per category and plotted their distributions through time to visualize the trends.