Bird surveys are a popular way to conduct citizen science of birds in specific locations. Data-sets can be created by recording species, date, and location in order to determine abundance and distribution for expected and unexpected species in a particular location at a particular date. Our study created data-sets that were added to Ebird, an online database, to help understand the current species abundance and distribution of Campanario, a remote biological station in Costa Rica with limited data on this matter. Additionally, we envisioned our study would bring more scientists, avid birders, and students to continue to add data from this location with hopes of enabling future comparative studies with more complete data-sets. To assist future bird watchers at this site, we aimed to collect key identification information as well as answer the question of whether time of day had an affect on the abundance of birds and species richness found. We tested this by bird watching for hour intervals across three separate time categories: sunrise, morning, and afternoon. This was replicated across three habitats. We used one-way ANOVAs to look for significance between time of day and abundance as well as time of day and species richness. Once significance was found, we used a two-way ANOVA to test for interaction between the time of day and habitat.
Results/Conclusions
We reported a total of 38 species and 255 individuals on the Ebird database. We created a guide containing scientific name, pictures, and behavior descriptions of all of the species found as well as instructions on how to properly collect data and input it on Ebird to aid in future bird data collection at this site. We tested the hypothesis of whether time of day affects bird abundance and species richness. Initially, we found a higher abundance earlier in the day (ANOVA F2,1=4.319, P=0.0405). However, there was also a significant interaction between habitat and time of day (ANOVA F2,1=3.437, P=0.0365), indicating that bird abundance was not independent of habitat type. Additionally, there was no significant trend between the time of day and species richness. We need more information at this site for future comparisons. It is important to note the current patterns of bird distributions as any noticed changes in the future will be indicators of the impacts of climate change.