Environmental changes can have different causes on local level (e.g. soil sealing) as well as on global level (e.g. climate change). To detect these changes and to find patterns in the reasons for them it is necessary to collect broad environmental data, temporally and spatially. Thereto citizens can play an essential role to collect the data. In particular, we developed a system which enables citizens to monitor the occurrence and distribution of birds and provides the collected data to the public in order that both researchers and citizens can derive conclusions from them. With our automated approach we want to support other citizen science solutions like eBird where contributors manually report their sightings.
Therefore, we built a prototypical bird feeder equipped with several sensors and the infrastructure to process the data collected by the feeder. The feeder is easy to reproduce at a reasonable price by following an open available manual. This allows anyone to build the feeder on their own, enabling a large distribution at many locations. The feeder automatically detects when a bird is visiting it, takes an image of the bird, determines the species and connects the observation with environmental data like the temperature or light intensity. All the collected data are published on a developed open access platform. Incorporating other surrounding factors like the proximity of the feeder station to the next forest or a large street allows it to pursue various questions regarding the occurrence of birds. One of them might ask, how does the immediate environment affect bird abundance? Or do sealed surfaces have a negative effect compared to a flowering garden?
This repository contains the code to run the bird feeder which is equipped among other things with a motion sensor, camera, balance, microphone and further environmental sensors. All the collected data is send to a server which is based on this webserver. The repositories are currently still under development, the code for the operation of the feeder as well as for the web server are continuously updated. A corresponding manual for the operation of the system including open source instructions for building the feeder will follow soon.
CountYourBirds is a project by a group of students at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster. If you got any questions contact us via: info@birdiary.de.
Thank you for considering contributing to Birdiary. Birdiary is an open source project, and we love to receive contributions from our community — you!
There are many ways to contribute, from writing tutorials or blog posts, improving the design of the station, submitting bug reports and feature requests or writing code which can be incorporated into Birdiary itself.
We use GitHub to host code, to track issues and feature requests, as well as accept pull requests.
This Repository comprises the code and issues for the station. Which means, if you want to contribute to the code running on the station, please contribute here. Contributions in this repository do not have to stick to the code. They can also be about the hardware or design of the station. Whereas when you want to contribute to the webserver(website), please use this repository https://github.com/Birdiary/webserver
In the GitHub wiki you can find information on how to build and run your own Birdiary. If you have any ideas for improvement of the manual or the station itself, feel free to inform us.
If you find a security vulnerability, do NOT open an issue. Email info@wiediversistmeingarten.org instead.
If you encounter a bug, check if the bug has already been reported here https://github.com/Birdiary/station/issues. If the bug has not been reported, you can open an issue to report the bug here https://github.com/Birdiary/station/issues/new. For a bug, please add the label "bug".
When filing an issue, make sure to answer these four questions:
- What operating system and processor architecture are you using?
- What did you do?
- What did you expect to see?
- What did you see instead?
If you wish a special feature, feel free to add it as an issue, like a bug https://github.com/Birdiary/station/issues/new. Here, please add the label "enhancement". Add the moment, we appreciate any suggestions.
Next to reporting bugs or suggesting features, we really appreciate code contributions. We suggest contributing through forking and pull-requests. A guideline how to fork a project and create a pull request can be found here: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/contributing-to-projects
We look at pull requests on a regular basis and give feedback or merge them directly into our main repository.
You can also contribute by merging a pull request into your local copy of the project and testing the changes. Add the outcome of your testing in a comment on the pull request.
Further, you can validate an issue or add additional context to an existing issue.