The Impact of Climate Change on Birds

Predict the impact of climate change on bird distributions using spatial data and machine learning.

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11 Tasks1,500 XP

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Project Description

Climate is changing around the world. This change is impacting species of wild animals. In this project, we will use four decades of bird sightings and climate data to predict the distribution of a bird species in the Scottish Highlands and see how its distribution changed over the years.

We will use data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and a subset of the UKCP09 climate data from the UK Met Office.

Project Tasks

1
Tracking a changing climate

2
Mapping a changing climate
3
Fieldwork in the digital age – download the data
4
Sorting out the bad eggs – data cleaning
5
Nesting the data
6
Making things spatial - projecting our observations
7
Extract exactly what we want
8
Pseudo-absences
9
Making models - with caret
10
Prediction probabilities
11
A map says more than a thousand words

Technologies

Topics

Data Manipulation Data Visualization Machine Learning Importing & Cleaning Data

Laurens Geffert

Senior Product Analyst and Tech Lead at Google

Laurens has been using R for over ten years. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge where he used geospatial machine learning and modeling to predict the future of the world's fisheries. He has worked in a wide range of domains, from the UN and NGOs over the credit and insurance sector to retail and ad tech. You can find his blog at janlauge.github.io.

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