THE BAD NEWS: A lot of work remains to fill in gaps, join data, analyze it and make it useful.
Here is an update on our progress with the analysis of all the LIS data we received from the many (about 60) outstanding observers earlier in 2017, from both the NY and CT sides of Long Island Sound, with 175 trip reports, from 75 location groups, which were broken into about 110 distinct sub-locations for checklist preciseness (the map above does not yet include all those locations). If nothing else, we at least took a good "snap-shot" of the birds in LIS in the March-April period in 2017, as a baseline for comparison in decades to come, and we are looking into several ways to preserve this dataset (including its non-eBird data, which is more likely to get lost) for many decades.
First, let me say that all observers' names will be applied (manually, by me) to this database soon.... eBird does not export that data (observers' names) under certain circumstances! We added a column (column S) called REPORTER and will fill-in the names of the observer who reported the trip data to us. Here is an example of how that will look (click to enlarge this image, and then press ESC key to return) ...
Second, this database currently contains ALL the eBird checklists/reports which were "shared" to "LIS seawatch" in the first four months of 2017 (January 1 through April 11, 2017). We will use filtering to suppress data which is not part of the Super Seawatches, which were conducted March 25 and April 9 and a few days around that.
Third, this database does not yet contain the NON-eBird data submitted in various ways (emails, scanned paper lists, etc), but it will soon, as I find time to manually insert that data row-by-row properly, carefully. Note that a single trip consists of multiple rows, one row for each species.
Fourth, this database exists as one worksheet table in the Google Spreadsheet online (originally with 3,374 rows), and you can click on the following link and go in and explore it, in a read-only mode, without any concern about altering its contents. You can click on its rows and scroll down to get a feeling for the raw data...
LIS SuperSeaWatch raw data 2017 - Google Sheets << click and navigate the data table.
You can alternatively click on this static image to greatly enlarge it, and then press ESC key to return...
"Submission ID" in column B is Checklist# which uniquely identifies each trip report in eBird, and starts with the letter S.
Fifth, the thousands of records in this table were sorted on four columns: Date, Time, Location, and TaxonomicOrder (the id number which uniquely identifies bird species in eBird).
Sixth, this online table of raw data is the foundation for analyses we will do over the next few months, which will be reported here. Meanwhile feel free to send us any questions you would like our analyses to address, or you may be able to manipulate this database yourself to do some analysis.
