​Over 600 different species of birds have been recorded in the UK to date. For many of them, formal monitoring is limited or even absent. The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) ask for volunteers from the general public to report nature observations from all around the UK via mobile apps or online data entries such as BirdTrack. This data is important as estimating bird distributions and population trends not only increases our knowledge about bird species but also their habitats.

Over 60,000 volunteers are involved recording bird species, resulting in a massive amount of data collected - in 2020 alone over 7.5 million records have been submitted to BirdTrack. Researchers at BTO have been using JASMIN to carry out statistical analysis on this data in order to better understand the reliability of Citizen Science data, and the changes in UK bird populations that can be inferred from it.

The project used LOTUS, JASMIN’s batch computing cluster, which splits the analyses into chunks so they can be run in parallel, thus speeding up the process. Using LOTUS means that the bird population models could be run for many different species in only a few hours, rather than weeks on a regular desktop computer.

JASMIN enabled the project to process BirdTrack data by developing, testing and implementing statistical models for studying bird population trends. Without JASMIN, this research would not have been possible.

JASMIN is managed jointly by the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Scientific Computing Department and the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis.

Read the full story at: https://www.ceda.ac.uk/blog/jasmin-helps-track-the-impact-of-climate-change-on-uk-birds/​