Dr Philipp Boersch‑Supan

New paper - Robustness of simple trend models for citizen science data

A new paper on bird population trend models 🐦📈 led by myself in collaboration with Amanda Trask and Stephen Baillie has appeared in Biological Conservation: Robustness of simple avian population trend models for semi-structured citizen science data is species-dependent

We compared & myself compared population trends derived from structured breeding bird surveys and unstructured bird lists from the BirdTrack citizen science scheme using a simple statistical model, i.e. one that did not explicitly account for preferential sampling in the latter dataset. We found that - even when not accounting for sampling bias - reporting rate trends from BirdTrack broadly resembled those derived from the structured survey for common and widespread birds. However, this agreement was less good for rare species and those with little or uncertain population change.

You can read a full summary of the paper at the BTO website.

A free preprint of the paper is available at this link.