The task is to develop and make publicly available a web application that allows anyone to calculate population trends based on systematic monitoring data of Swedish birds and mammals.
Background
The task relates to official national environmental monitoring in Sweden. The Swedish Bird Survey (“Svensk Fågeltaxering”) is a monitoring program run at Lund University, commissioned by the Swedish Environmental Protection Board (“Naturvårdsverket”). The overall mission is to find out how the Swedish birds and mammals are doing – which species are increasing, which are declining?
Hundreds of volunteers count birds and mammals at the same sites year after year after fixed protocols and then report to our central office that analyse how the number of birds and mammals changes over time. For this we use a statistical tool called TRIM (Trends & Indices in Monitoring Data), which is used widely within the European bird monitoring community. We already use a local and customized version of an R Shiny app (rTrim), but it needs to be modified and completed. Following that, we want to make the app publicly available in a web application that allows anyone to calculate population trends based on systematic monitoring data from our databases, for any combination of species, geographical area and time period.
Why?
There are several reasons why we ask for help. First, it will help us in our internal work. Second, people from other authorities, as well as the public, have asked for the possibility for anyone to calculate a population trend. Third, it will increase the use and awareness of monitoring data in an era where biodiversity is under increasing pressure.
We think it is an interesting, useful and suitable task for a student project. The project will be supervised by the researchers who have been using the existing app for year, and by our IT staff.
What to do?
- Adapt the app to a new data source
- Add new features, especially concerning the presentation of the statistical results
- Deploy the app on a public environment
Who?
A student with good knowledge in R and basics in web languages (html, css). An interest or a background in biology is most likely a bonus, but not crucial.
When and for how long ?
The project can start any time soon, and we estimate the task to take 4-5 months.
If you are interested, please contact:
Mathieu Blanchet: mathieu.blanchet@biol.lu.se