The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $30 million in funding to three Expeditions in Computing projects. Each grant will provide $10 million over five years to interdisciplinary, multi-investigator research teams to support transformative computing and information technology research. The Expeditions projects constitute the largest single investments in computer and information science research NSF has made. One of these $10 million grants was awarded to a team lead by Carla Gomes of Cornell University to advance Computational Sustainability, which aims to apply computational techniques to balance environmental, economic and societal needs to support sustainable development and a sustainable future. The eBird Team frequently collaborates with Carla and her team—please read more to learn about her work and the official NSF press release showcasing our new abundance map of Tree Swallow.
The animation shows the annual cycle of the entire Tree Swallow population. The "hotter" the color, the higher relative abundance of the population at that location. This visualization allows us to see how Tree Swallows migrate across the continent and to identify the most important regions during each phase of the journey.
In the winter, Tree Swallows concentrate into distinct eastern and western sub-populations. As the spring migration begins, these populations explode northward and expand across the entire continent into their breeding grounds. The fall migration proceeds at a more leisurely pace as the populations return south, separating, and then concentrating into the Central Valley of California, the lower Mississippi River valley and Florida.
The animation was produced using the Spatio-Temporal Exploratory Model to predict population abundances across broad spatial and temporal scales. By relating local environmental features derived from NASA remote sensing data to observations of species from eBird, the model can discover complex spatio-temporal patterns and make predictions at unsampled locations and times.
Read more at: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/expeditionsgrant2016/
