PHEAT – Please Help Establish Autumn Timing
PHEAT is the mini-project within SABAP2 for autumn 2010, from the middle of February until the end of May.
One of the objectives for SABAP2 is to help define the timing of migration. Last year we did two mini-projects in autumn and spring to achieve this: LAMP, the Long Autumn Migration Project and WHAMB, Welcome Home All Migrant Birds. What these mini-projects demonstrated is that we have the ability to establish the timing of migration on an annual basis. The SABAP2 fieldwork protocol turns out to be really well suited for this. We know for sure that this is the case because Team SABAP2 supported LAMP and WHAMB last year magnificently and gathered amazing volumes of high quality data.
The reason why it is important to quantify the timing of arrival and departure is that we live in an era of change, and one of the predictions of global climate change is that long distance migrants are at risk. You can read up about this in the booklet produced for the Copenhagen climate change conference last December. One of the case studies in the booklet shows there are changes between SABAP1 and SABAP2 in the timing of both arrival and departure of Barn Swallows. If we can get large sample sizes of carefully made checklists for as many pentads as possible and as frequently as possible, we can compare the timing of arrival and departure of many species of migrants between individual years. That is why we are doing PHEAT this autumn!
As the migrants depart, they get fewer and fewer and it takes longer and longer before you encounter them, and the overall pattern is for them to be further down the ordered atlas checklist. Finally, you realize that it is weeks since you last had a Barn Swallow on your checklist. The three and a half months from mid-February to the end of May represent the only opportunity we will ever have to quantify the departure of migrants in the autumn of 2010. The best way to do this is go "deep" and to make repeated checklists for pentads. This is what PHEAT is all about.
Of course, we still want our atlasers to go wide, to reach the unatlased and underatlased pentads, and these checklists will also contribute to the goals of PHEAT. But particularly in autumn (and spring) there is huge value in going deep, and that is what PHEAT. We hope that there will be lots of pentads with large numbers of checklists.
How about setting yourself the target of doing one of your favourite pentads every weekend this autumn?
Please Help Establish Autumn Timing
15 February 2010 - 31 May 2010
more...
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Category
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Actual
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Active observers
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559
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Cards submitted
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4807
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Pentads
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2265
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New Pentads
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632
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Records submitted
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241127
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