Melanie Smith, USA
Melanie Smith, Audubon Science Team, Alaska, USA
x2014Talk xTalk x2018Map xCartography xSpecies xMovement xModel xBird xHabitat xMarine
Melanie Smith Professional Website SCGIS Profile
Audubon Profile: "Program Director for the Migratory Bird Information Platform. This program focuses on visualizing and synthesizing migration patterns and stressors across the Americas to inform conservation needs of migratory birds."
2018 Public Service Commendation from US Coast Guard for Audubon Alaska
2018 Best Atlas Prize & Best Cartography Award, Esri UC Intl Map Competition
2014 Conference Paper:
Mapping Important Areas for Seabirds: How to Draw the Boundary Line
Presenter(s): Melanie Smith, Audubon Alaska SESSION: Species Movement and Modeling
"During a multi-year process of identifying important Bird Areas in Alaska we established new methods for recognizing globally significant seabird hot spots using data from pelagic survey transects. The process required developing gradient maps summarizing bird density or abundance by species and a method for delineating boundaries. Drawing lines is necessary to establish conservation areas or perform marine spatial planning, yet few have focused on analytical approaches for moving from gradient maps to boundaries.
We explored many spatial-ecological questions to find the most effective approach. Delineation methods included expert-drawn lines, buffering significant seabird colonies, quantile maps, and density-dependent contours. We settled on a moving window approach to summarize data and derive boundaries because it required fewer processing steps, provided a measure of local abundance which allowed us to easily test significance thresholds, and is not sensitive to scaling issues related to study area size. The approach worked well for a wide range of birds, including loons, albatrosses, shearwaters, storm-petrels, cormorants, diving ducks, gulls, terns, and alcids in marine areas ranging from temperate to polar.
These methods should be broadly applicable across ecosystem types and species guilds, including both short- and longrange foragers and locally common to widely abundant species."
