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EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

eurobirdportal.org

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

#41
post #37
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most of the German/British tourists seem to come during the summer though" That never made any sense to me. I also go rather go with the birds north in summer where it is cool and to spain in winter when it is still warm.

Spanish winter is very cold too - it’s not the tropics.

It's not exactly freezing

Re: EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

#43
post #34

Website doesn't really work properly. As soon as I change the birds and update, it shows 0 birds for entire timespan.

Could it be you are selecting birds that are not actually in Europe, let alone native, yet are still listed for some reason, e.g., the wild turkey and california quail?

It makes me question the accuracy of the data if anything, especially since the Black Grouse also exists in places that are not mapped and I don’t see anything that could explain omissions, e.g., what the data is based on and how it is collected. My guess based on inexplicable data points for wild turkeys and california quail is that it’s somehow human logged sightings that are accidentally or either impressively logged.

Re: EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

#44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Real-time" been +seconds for decades at this point, pretty different from the "original" meaning, so "live" having the same treatment doesn't feel that out of place.

live + seconds feels pretty different from a time laps over months...

They're calling it "live" and "near real-time" because they're aggregating the data from underlying sources daily, whereas traditionally that happened only on much larger time scales.

It's not very fast compared to most things often called "live", so perhaps it's not a great label for this demo viewer, but the goal of the project seems to be to make the data available for research, not so much for this map.

Re: EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

#45
post #35

Would be cool if the data was accessible easily via a public API, but from what it sounds like here that's not really the case https://www.eurobirdportal.org/ebp/en/help/#third_parties

Some of the bird data used is available in https://www.GBIF.org (website + APIs + data dumps) but not all of it.

For a visualization like this, the place to start is probably the most recent monthly data snapshot which is available on AWS/Google/Azure's open data portals: https://www.gbif.org/occurrence-snapshots

e.g. start with a DuckDB query:

   SELECT scientificName, individualCount, year, month, day, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, issue
   FROM read_parquet('s3://gbif-open-data-eu-central-1/occurrence/2026-09-01/occurrence.parquet/*')
   WHERE class = 'Aves';
(The initial query will be rather slow, I'm currently working on improving this export. I suggest creating a local table and working from that. Alternatively, for a smaller export than "all birds" request a data download through the website.)

Re: EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

#48
I see it's a portal tracking bird data from other websites. I am doing the same but for East Africa, not live birds but generally monitoring biodiversity, what is happening from ebird, to Xeno-canto to iNaturalist every week. Any new research grade species, new updates to ebird and XC sound additions. East Africa is very under monitored compared to other places. Still work in progress. https://platform.maiyoinstitute.org/

Re: EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

#49
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who emigrated from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, birds are not the only ones indeed :) Most of the German/British tourists seem to come during the summer though, in contrast to the tourist birds who come during winter. Smart of the birds to avoid all the tourists!

"Most of the German/British tourists seem to come during the summer though" That never made any sense to me. I also go rather go with the birds north in summer where it is cool and to spain in winter when it is still warm.

Well, your way makes no sense, I visit cold places when they're the warmest (their summer) and make sure to stay home in the summer when it's the warmest. Almost like some people prefer a "cold" life and others a "warm" one, and that's OK :) Not more than preferences, doesn't have to make sense.

Re: EuroBirdPortal – Live bird movements across Europe

#50
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish winter is very cold too - it’s not the tropics.

It's not exactly freezing

In some places, it definitely is, we go skiing in Spain in the winter :) Besides, even around Barcelona we get snow every 6-7 years, although it's not like in the north of the world exactly.
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