Philipp Boersch-Supan

BTO

Title: Counting birds and other hard problems

Abstract: The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) is one of the world’s leading research organisations specialising in knowledge about birds. BTO organises and conducts a broad spectrum of ecological monitoring projects and is a major custodian of wildlife data, with datasets that are both extensive in space and time.

Analysing these data is not always straightforward, as non-random sampling, measurement errors and other challenging features are prevalent in many of them. I will present examples of recent BTO work on addressing these challenges in the context of estimating population trends from multiple data sources, estimating three-dimensional densities of birds around renewable energy infrastructure, and estimating the timing of birds’ annual cycles.