Together with my close collaborators and team members,
we are working on a global project focused on escape distances (FID or flight initiation distances) of birds.
Escape distances of birds have been studied from many perspectives, and there is currently a large and growing literature on this topic.
Our goal is to pull together as much FID data from around the world as possible to create a global, open-source, FID trait database that can be used to support global trait-based analyses.
We also aim to publish the accompanying paper and database as a data paper in which all contributors will be co-authors.
To achieve this, we are trying to put together an international team of researchers with similar interests to use this open database and address both old and new ideas on the processes determining escape distances of birds. We are currently building a webpage dedicated to this project.
We now are collating all avian FID data. We are interested primarily in FIDs estimated by human walking approach (not by bike, drone, or boat) and for non-alarmed birds (i.e. individuals foraging, singing, resting, or just perching). We are currently not looking for data from birds on their nests. We are also primarily interested in already collected data.
If you are interested in this project, please, share your primary data with me ASAP (ideally via this email: petomikula158@gmail.com). In any case, submit your data before 25 November 2022. I can postpone this deadline for you for a couple of weeks under special circumstances such as fieldwork or large amounts of unprocessed observations.
In exchange for your data sharing, we offer you cooperation on this project and co-authorship on the joint data publication. Please, notice that we plan to build an open database using all this data; in other words, by sharing your primary data with us, you also agree with their deposition on a publicly available platform.
Please, send me your FID data with as many associated variables (e.g., alert and starting distances, flock size, time of data collection, temperature, escape mode, singing or other behaviours etc.) as possible.
Minimum obligatory variables for each observation are: FID, species ID, geographic coordinates (either at the level of locality or for each individual bird)
, and date; however, daytime, alert distance and/or starting distances are quite important too.
If you have any questions or need more details, please, contact me. I am looking forward to your answer.
Many thanks for considering joint collaboration on this project!
P.S. You can check for project updates here:
https://www.researchgate.net/project/Avian-fear-Global-database-of-escape-distances-in-birds-joint-project