Migratory Connectivity in Wetland Birds (Citizen Science + Isotopes)
Citizen monitoring and distribution data for three wetland bird species (Sora, Virginia Rails, Yellow Rails) combined with stable isotopes to trace migratory routes across the USA.
- Size
- 1.7 GB
- Format
- ZIP
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Access
- Open Access
- Source
- Zenodo (record 4980154)
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Challenge
Feathers carry a hydrogen-isotope (deuterium, dD) signature from the latitude where they grew. Using the rail feather isotopes, can you show whether birds caught at southern wetlands all came from one northern breeding region or from many — i.e. is migratory connectivity tight or diffuse?
- Where to start
- Read stable_isotopes.csv from inside data_files.zip (no extraction needed). Clean the species column ('yera recap' -> 'yera', drop the stray 'year' rows), then compare dD across species and across the capture 'state' field. Calibrate the dD-latitude relationship with jpe12723-sup-0001-AppendixS1.csv (encoding='latin-1'; its latitude/longitude are DMS strings you must parse to decimal degrees), which pairs breeding-ground feather dD with latitude.
- What to share
- A plot relating feather dD to capture latitude/season for one species (Sora has the most data), with the breeding-ground calibration line for reference, plus a short interpretation of whether connectivity is tight or diffuse and what that implies for wetland conservation.
💬 Discuss this dataset, ask questions and share your results in its discussion thread. Challenges are open-ended — there's no single right answer.