ISSS608 2017-18 T3 Assign Zhang Yingdi Conclusions

VAST Mini Challenge 1: "Cheep" Shots?

Background

Data Description

Task 1

Task 2

Conclusions

Back to Dropbox

Hypothese1: Rose-crested Blue Pipit is surviving, but not thriving on the Preserve.

Evidence to support the assertion are listed below:

1. Based on the collection of birds calls from the Preserve over years given by Mistford College, there are four species that have a sharp decrease of the number of records over the collection of years. They are Rose-crested Blue Pipit, Lesser Birchbeere, Bombadil, Purple Tooting Tout. There is a sharp drop of the number of records for Rose-crested Blue Pipit on 2016 and 2017. The number of records dropped from 45 to 27 on year 2016, and further dropped from 27 to 16 on year 2017.
2. Out of the 15 bird’s files provided by Kasios, only one bird is Rose-crested Blue Pipit. After consideration of the predication result of both the machine learning approach and visualization approach, only test bird 9 is identified as Rose-crested Blue Pipit.
3. Furthermore, the one Rose-crested Blue Pipit identified is not near to the dumping site.

Based on the above assertion, we can conclude that the Rose-crested Blue Pipit is surviving, but not thriving across the Preserve as claimed by Kasios.

Hypothese2:The dumping site may have been a primary contributor to the apparent reduction of the number of nesting pairs of the Rose-Crested Blue Pipit.

Evidence to support the assertion are listed below:

1. For the species that have a stable number of records or increased number of records, their home range are all relatively far away from the dumping site.
2. For the species that have a mild decrease of records, we can see that some of the species have a home range near to the dumping site.
3. There are four species that have a sharp decrease of the number of records over the collection of years. They are Rose-crested Blue Pipit, Lesser Birchbeere, Bombadil, Purple Tooting Tout. Out of the four species, both Rose-crested Blue Pipit and Lesser Birchbeere have a home range near the dumping site, hence, the dumping site may have been a primary contributor to the apparent reduction of the number of nesting pairs of the Rose-Crested Blue Pipit.
4. Three species near the dumping site had a reduction of numbers over the years, they are Rose-crested Blue Pipit, Lesser Birchbeere and Ordinary Snape.
5. The home range of Rose-crested Blue Pipit moves towards the dumping site from year 2005 to year 2013. However, they started to move away from the dumping site from 2014 onwards. Moving away from the dumping site may be an indication that there is dumped process waste near the dumping site that is harmful to the Rose-Crested Blue Pipit, so they started to move away from the dumping site in 2014.
6. Lesser Birchbeere and Ordinary Snape had a trend of moving towards the dumping site might due to the unawareness of the harmful materials dumped, which cause the sharp and mild reductions for the two species respectively over the years. This finding further support that the dumping site may have been a primary contributor to the apparent reduction of the number of nesting pairs of the Rose-Crested Blue Pipit.
7. In general, we can see that species which have home ranges nearer to the dumping site tend to have a higher chance of experiencing sharp reduction.

Next Step

In order to confirm whether the Pipits are actually thriving across the Preserve, we should find out whether the dumping site is indeed the cause of population reduction. The below steps should be taken in the investigation:

During our investigation, we found that the home range for Bombadil and Purple Tooting Tout are not near to dumping site, but they also experienced a sharp decrease of numbers over the years. Hence there might be other reasons that will cause the number of birds decrease besides the dumping site. Climate change might be possible factor, as we can see that there is a change of numbers of birds quarterly. The number of bird records tends to be higher in Q2 and lower in Q4. Hence, we suggest to further justify whether the reduction of the population is due to the climate change.

Secondly, we can do some research to see if the banned substance Methylosmolene has a threat on Rose-Crested-Blue-Pipit, if the banned substance had been proved that it has a serious impact for the Rose Pipit, the population reduction of Rose Pipit may due to the dumping of the substance Methylosmolene by Kasios.