Bufflehead BirdFlow model report

Species

Species: Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola)
eBird code: buffle
Prebreeding migration: February 15 to May 24
Postbreeding migration: September 13 to December 20)

Abundance and Flux

Abundance: Abundance data provided by Cornell Lab of Ornithology | eBird, resampled to 100 km cells. The highest values are truncated down to the 99th percentile of the values to eliminate extreme outliers. BirdFlow models are trained on abundance.

Flux: Flux represents the relative number of birds migrating through each part of the landscape in a week given the model parameters and the assumption that the bird follow a straight path for each transition. To calculate flux the probability of each movement in the model (excluding stationary birds) is assigned to a line that connects the start and end of the movement. The probability of each line is then added to all the cells within 50 km of the line.

Routes

These stochastic routes are generated from the BirdFlow model (see BirdFlowR::route ) and can be used to assess performance. Each step of the route is created by sampling the probabilities assigned to the bird’s next location given a starting date and location. The initial locations are sampled from the probability distribution for the species at the start of the migration. The stay length is one if the bird moves on immediately and longer when the bird stays in the location for multiple steps.

eBird

The metadata here comes from eBird via ebirdst::ebirdst_runs. Data quality ranges from 0 to 3, with 3 being the highest quality.

Data quality: 3, 3, 3, 3 (prebreeding, breeding, postbreeding, and nonbeeding)
Version year: 2022
Release year: 2023

BirdFlow

Model Files
Rds
hdf5

Model date: 2024-08-14
Traverse correlation: 0.9503
Mean step correlation: 0.9762
Min step correlation: 0.9043

For an explanation of the correlations see BirdFlowR::distribution_performance()

Learn more

BirdFlow is a joint project between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It is funded by the US National Science Foundation

BirdFlow project page
BirdFlowR package (source)
BirdFlowPy
BirdFlow: Learning Seasonal Bird Movements from Citizen Science Data Miguel Fuentes, Benjamin M. Van Doren, Daniel Fink, Daniel Sheldon bioRxiv 2022.04.12.488057; doi:[https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.12.488057](https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.12.488057)
eBird Status and Trends Fink, D., T. Auer, A. Johnston, M. Strimas-Mackey, S. Ligocki, O. Robinson, W. Hochachka, L. Jaromczyk, C. Crowley, K. Dunham, A. Stillman, I. Davies, A. Rodewald, V. Ruiz-Gutierrez, C. Wood. 2023. eBird Status and Trends, Data Version: 2022; Released: 2023. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. https://doi.org/10.2173/ebirdst.2022

License

Bufflehead BirdFlow Model by BirdFlowScience is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Disclaimer

This material uses data from the eBird Status and Trends Project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird.org. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Last updated: 2025-03-25