variuos reports

[Paolo Matteucci]

Dear reviewers,

(I hope this is not a can of worms and I do not want look too picky) 

can the filters be a little tighten up and/or how to address the issue of the suspicious (when not patentely wrong) report of common species?

I keep seeing mis-ids such as

great cormorant entered as double crested

red breasted as common merganser

bufflehed as hooded merganser

and so on (the one I find most disturbing is: brant for canada goose, at least in metro Hfx area)

these things mess up with bar charts, the various winter and dowl list (not that I care), hotspots charts, ebird reputation, enthusiasm of accurate ebirders, etc.

The most apparent serial offenders are known (but apart from huge rarites theur the data remain in the system). Other ones are not. There are patent stringers, too.

Some mistakes are not avoidable, but other mistakes are.

Paolo

[Dominic Cormier]

Hi Pablo,

I agree that our filters need tightening, it is just a long steady process. Each county has a filter and I know Halifax isn't the best. Shelburne, Yarmouth and Kings are some of the best. 

I will put Halifax on the top to tighten.

As for mis'ID'd common species, that is a worldwide problem that is not easily fixed. It would take many hours a week sleuthing through hundreds of checklists manually to spot some errors. That said, the Bufflehead-Hooded Merganser, and the Red-breasted-Common Merganser issues should be relatively straightforward to find, as the latter in both examples tend to be localized in winter. Sometimes we just need a little heads up to dig into a problem.

While I don't want to advocate for bad data, it will always be a fact of life when it comes to eBird. This is particularly true with beginner birders. Often discussed, one solution that has been proposed is that for every new eBird user, there is a probabtionary period before their data becomes public. Not a bad idea, but implementation could be problematic. 

As for hotspots, things become a bit trickier because each hotspot is not inherently defined, and depending on where you birded, this can lead to the perception that non-hotspot birds are making it on the list, when perhaps the birder started at the hotspot but walked 2km in the 'wrong' direction. While I am happy to look at checklists of > 5 km, and encourage the use of a personal location if the birder crossed many hotspots, I do not want to rigidly define what constitutes each hotspot.

All that said, it is always a work in progress and us reviewers appreciate any and all feedback.

Regards,

Dominic

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NS eBird discussions" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ns-ebird-discussions+unsub...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to ns-ebird-discussions@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ns-ebird-discussions/CAKmh_Bsck-RpyYeP%3DJ9uSCno_EADOpLgOqHL9xH7G8HWdUf2tQ%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Dominic Cormier]

That should have read Paolo not Pablo! Haha I have been in Ecuador too long!

Dominic

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ns-ebird-discussions+unsubscrib...@googlegroups.com.