BirdSTATs

Bioland Informatie develops the BirdSTATs tool upon request by the Pan European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme (PECBMS). The European Commission funds the tool’s design and programming through the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

This tool is an open-source database that allows users to adapt or expand the tool to their own demands. The tool is also usable for other species groups.

Characteristics of the tool:

• It eases the use of TRIM;
• It is capable of importing different kinds of counts data;
• It enables analyses of subsets of count sites and counts (stratification) and stores options and settings for analyses of all species-stratum combinations for future use;
• It eases the use of a covariate and weighing procedures in TRIM;
• It produces standardized TRIM input and TRIM command files and runs TRIM in batch mode for all or a selection of species and count site subsets (strata);
• It collects the main results of the batched TRIM output in a convenient and standardized format to fit the requirements of PECBMS.

What is new in the updated version 2.1 (2015/2016):
(1) Besides the programme Manual, Frequently Asked Questions on the BirdSTATs are added, which provide useful advice for the work with the programme.

(2) The following changes in the new version of BirdSTATs were created:

• BirdSTATs is adjusted to work in the 64-bit version of Office/Access 2013 in Windows 10 while still working on Windows7 machines (32 or 64 bits) with 32-bit versions of Office/Access 2003 and upward.
• Both an accdb and an mdb version were made available. These are the same except for their extension. The accdb version, however, is the only one that can import data from another accdb. So users wanting to work with data from another accdb have to use the accdb version.
• The tables with country-codes and species are updated. The list of species in the species table was extended significantly, especially with subspecies. However, no additional English names were added.
• A possibility to import CSV-files is introduced to improve interchange with R and other programming tools & database programs.
• The form of copying stratum definitions to other species is improved.
• The form for choosing which species to calculate is improved.
• The form for transforming/transposing data (available in settings) is improved.
• The two .stu files are no longer provided. These were necessary to be able to work with older versions of TRIM.

The updated version of the BirdSTATs released in March 2016 can be downloaded here (3.2 MB).

Online tool – a new way of output delivery

The online tool is designed for the national coordinators. It enables the comfortable upload of national species indices with a detailed data check. It easily helps to discover outliers, discrepancies, or wrong data files. Thanks to one of the functions called the “Consistency tool”, it is possible to check the consistency of data for a species by comparing two years in a graph. At the moment, there is an available Online tool interface for TRIM/Birdstats outputs, but we are working on an interface for the RTRIM-shell data upload and check.

The Online tool tutorial

We created a commented Online tool tutorial to speed up understanding how does Online tool work. Because of the development of the Online tool, this tutorial is planned to be regularly updated. Therefore, before you start RTRIM-shell analyses, it is worth checking the Tutorial. The Online tool is divided into 4 parts because of the large size.
Date of update: 28^th April 2020
On-line tool tutorial_update_part 1 can be watched here.
On-line tool tutorial_update_part 2 can be watched here.
On-line tool tutorial_update_part 3 can be watched here.
On-line tool tutorial_update_part 4 can be watched here.