Using iNat histograms to forecast feathers found
I’m messing around with this histogram tool by @pisum (thank you!!) and was able to get the settings so that you can see observations from the Found Feathers project by month. By modifying the parameters, you can get views of various taxons and locations, among other things.
This is exciting to me because I’ve explored the question of “when do you find the most feathers?” casually before (by which I mean throwing iNat numbers into Excel and cobbling together bar charts) and preliminary results suggest that the time that birds lose feathers varies by region and type of bird. This is great news! Because it suggests that maybe there are certain times that it might be easier to look for certain kinds of feathers, and we can go beyond simply saying that it is “molting season” by identifying exactly when that molting season happens for specific hemispheres/continents/countries/states, right down to the species level with enough data!
I haven’t dug into this all the way yet (hence why I’m not posting to Found Feathers)—but I hypothesize the following:
- Northern/Southern hemisphere should be roughly flipped in timing of the molting season
- Molting timing should differ most greatly at the order level, with species in the same genus/family being generally similar in molting strategy
- The time at which different types of feathers are molted may vary in the same species (i.e. a Gray Catbird might molt its primaries in a different window than its tail feathers or body feathers)
- Molting timing may change according to climate, with a hotter year shifting molting earlier
All hypothetical! But all answerable with enough tinkering with URLs.
Anyways, here are links to histograms that I think are interesting—flip through them quickly to see the differences!
All birds, everywhere: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=any&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=3
All birds, Northern Hemisphere: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?nelat=90&nelng=180&swlat=0&swlng=-180&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=3
All birds, Southern Hemisphere: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?nelat=0&nelng=180&swlat=-90&swlng=-180&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=3
Feral Pigeons, Northern Hemisphere: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?nelat=90&nelng=180&swlat=0&swlng=-180&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=122767
Feral Pigeons, Southern Hemisphere: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?nelat=0&nelng=180&swlat=-90&swlng=-180&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=122767
Accipitriformes (hawks/eagles/osprey) in the American Southeast (my region): https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=90754&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=71261
Passeriformes (songbirds) in the American Southeast: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=90754&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=7251
Strigiformes (owls) in the American Southeast: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=90754&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=19350
Columbiformes (pigeon/doves) in the American Southeast (apparently they peak in September!): https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=90754&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=2708
Accipitriformes in Europe: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=97391&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=71261
Passeriformes in Europe: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=97391&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=7251
Strigiformes in Europe: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=97391&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=19350
Columbiformes in Europe (still peaking in September, but barely): https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?place_id=97391&project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research&taxon_id=2708
By the way—to make your own custom queries, create a search query using the iNaturalist Explore page (prepopulated link for RG Found Feathers: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?project_id=found-feathers&quality_grade=research), grab the query string from the URL (i.e. everything after the question mark), and paste it at the end of this URL: https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNatAPIv1_observation_histogram?
For any long-term analysis of these histograms, I would like to see a tool with functionality implemented for the following:
- overlay of multiple histograms for (normalized) comparison (i.e. how does this taxon stack up to birds at large? or this other taxon?)
ability to choose taxon/location codes without having to look them up each time on the iNat explore page
Ideally I’ll fork pisum’s tool and do it myself, but I haven’t tried a project like this in HTML yet. Perhaps this will be my opportunity to be a good CompSci major and get well-acquainted with the iNat API (:
Comments
for comparison of multiple histograms, you can try using the History / Seasonality tab in iNat's "experimental" compare tool: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/compare. i'm not sure it's what i would think of as a "normalized" comparison, but it does a good job of allowing you to quickly compare 2 or more histograms (or you can also use it to view just one, too). the only downside of the iNat tool is that although you can save the URLs to return to your custom configurations later, the URLs are somewhat unintelligible for human brains.
also, i noticed that you're looking at the default interval (month of year) for all your examples. in case you didn't know, there are other intervals that can be visualized -- year, month, week, week of year, day, hour.
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