Observations of Whooping Cranes During Winter Aerial Surveys: 1950–2011 Original & Darwin Core Variant

Description

The Aransas-Wood Buffalo population of whooping cranes (Grus americana) declined to near extinction by the 1940s. Starting in winter 1950–1951, annual aerial surveys were conducted to observe and record the number of whooping cranes wintering on Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) and surrounding areas. This effort resulted in 38,332 observations of whooping crane groups being marked on paper maps between winter 1950–1951 and winter 2010–2011. We digitized those locations by matching the ArcMap 10 screen display as close as possible with the paper maps and approximating points in each of the marked locations. These data are freely available to the public. However, we caution that these data have quality issues and limitations due to, but not limited to, inconsistencies and lack of documentation on how data were collected, reliance on perceived knowledge of unmarked birds’ identities, and inaccuracies introduced during both recording and digitization. For more information refer to the document entitled "Observations of Whooping Cranes During Winter Aerial Surveys: 1950-2011." We request that proper credit to the compilers of this dataset is explicitly included in any work using these data. doi:10.7944/W3RP4B

Resources

Name Format Description Link
47 Tabular dataset as text file https://iris.fws.gov/APPS/ServCat/DownloadFile/251560?Reference=41842
47 Reformat to Darwin Core: The data for the Adult, Juvenile, and Unknown fields as a measurementorfact extension. The occurrence reformat to DwC combined these numbers to individualCount. https://iris.fws.gov/APPS/ServCat/DownloadFile/284482?Reference=41842
47 Reformat to Darwin Core: Occurrence data in Darwin Core format created using the ChatIPT. https://iris.fws.gov/APPS/ServCat/DownloadFile/284481?Reference=41842
57 This is a zip file containing the text file and PDF about the observations. Users should read the PDF to understand quality issues with this dataset. https://iris.fws.gov/APPS/ServCat/DownloadFile/42005?Reference=41842

Tags

  • wintering-grounds
  • general-biology-at-risk-biota-te-species
  • locations
  • radio-tags
  • grus-americana
  • historical-dataset
  • color-bands
  • whooping-crane

Topics

Categories