Jen installing a trail camera (photo by Lee Fahrney).
In this episode, we answer questions like "why is it important to follow protocol?" and "how do scientists know that they’re not counting the same animals over again?" and learn about "closure and repeatability" and why it's so important to scientists with our research expert Dr. Jennifer Stenglein who is a Quantitative Wildlife Research Scientist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
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Transcription
Hey and welcome to Questions Asked by Curious Kids, or Quack, a podcast made by Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance. This is a podcast where we gather questions about nature from kids to be answered with a local expert. My name is Mickenzee, I'm an educator, and I'll be the host for this series. This episode I'll be interviewing Dr Jen Stenglein, a Research Scientist at the Department of Natural Resources. Today we'll be answering questions about how research is done.
Alright let's get started with Jen!
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Mickenzee: Hey Jen, welcome to the show. Before we get started with the questions from the kids, could you tell us a little bit about what you do at the Department of Natural Resources?
Jen: Thanks for having me, it's great to be here. I work as a quantitative Wildlife Research scientist at the Department of Natural Resources, and there we take care of the wildlife of Wisconsin, that's my job anyway. I help keep tabs on the different populations of wildlife like deer and bobcat and fisher and otter, and try to understand each year what those populations are doing like: what the size of the population is, how it changes from year to year. So a lot of the things we work on our surveys to try to understand those populations.
Mickenzee: Wow, that is such a cool job. This episode we've got a couple questions about research and more specifically how scientists do their research. Could you tell us maybe your experience with research or maybe your favorite research project you were part of?
Jen: Yeah my favorite research project that I'm a part of is one I work on all the time and it's called Snapshot Wisconsin. And it is a Statewide trail camera project to monitor wildlife and we partner with people all across the state of Wisconsin. They volunteered to put a trail camera up and these trail cameras are pretty small, maybe they're like half the size of a box of cereal or something like that, and they go on a tree and they take pictures of wildlife every time an animal walks in front of it. And there's more than 2000 of these across the state and we get the data from those cameras and the data are photos and we get more than one million photos a month and those photos have to be classified, so we have to figure out what's in them so we might see one deer, one mom deer, and one fawn ,one baby deer, in a photo and with that information were able to track the deer population year to year and across the state. So I love that project because we get to work with volunteers and also volunteers across the world because they help us classify what's in the photos
Mickenzee: Yeah I've actually helped classify pictures with classes before and it's so much fun.
Jen: Oh awesome. You know we had some feedback that a lot of our photos were deer photos and blank photos ,but that might change because now we have different filters about what goes into the zooniverse platform which is where we have people classify so if you had classified before and you got frustrated with all the deer go back because this last season of photos was like almost entirely red fox, which was really fun.
Mickenzee: Oh that's really exciting. Yeah, it feels like you earn your stripes a little bit when you do a lot of deer and then you get a bear or a wolf suddenly. I love it. Our questions today were submitted by the third graders at Lincoln Elementary School here in Madison. The third graders were Volunteers in a citizen science project held by Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance called Bird Collision Corps. After learning about all of the protocol that they needed to do to volunteer they asked why is it important to follow the rules when doing research? For example, they always had to stop their morning walks by a very specific time.
Jen: Yeah that is a great question. I'm glad to that you use the word protocol because that's the word that I was going to use too. Every research project, I would say, every way to collect data there's going to be a set of rules that need to be followed and that's to make sure that you have consistency. And so that you'd be able to repeat what had been done kind of have the same findings and be able to track things across space and time reliably, so maybe one example of a reason why this is important is if there wasn't any rule about when during the day to monitor or to go out and look for those birds somebody might go in the middle of the night. And they would go in the middle of the night, and they might only hear owls and they'd say “Oh from my location from here in Wausau Wisconsin we only have owls” and somebody else might go right away in the morning and they are hearing all sorts of different birds and no owls and clearly the reason that's happening is not because there aren't owls in Dane County and there aren't other birds and Wausau, Wisconsin, but because people are doing the survey at different times and that then leads to just a different finding. You know one is monitoring birds at night one is monitoring birds in the morning so you'd expect to find differences, but then you can't compare those across space and time very easily. So in the work that I do, I'll give you a couple of other examples because I mostly work with trail cameras, like I said. Trail cameras are not great at detecting birds so my examples are more for wildlife mammals not birds. We are able to detect Sandhill Cranes and turkeys pretty well, and we'll have a newsletter coming out soon where one of our rare species we were able to detect now and then are Golden Eagles, so that's pretty cool.
Mickenzee: That's exciting!
Hiding fawn (photo by Tanner Pettit)
Jen: Yeah those are fun. But for my stuff that I do is trail cameras, one example of needing to follow a set protocol is for fawn to doe ratios. So that's for deer, and for deer we're tracking how many young, how many fawns are born and how many, kind of, survive until fall. So we need to be able to see the fawns on those trail cameras and we can only reliably see them in July and August. So fawns are born just at the very end of May, fawns are almost all born at the same time, but if we start to look for them right in May we don't see them right away because they are hiding; they’re bedded down and hiding with their moms so they're very hard to see on the trail cameras. But by July they still have spots, they still look like tiny baby deer, and then they're moving around with their moms. They're easier to see on the cameras, so it's only for July and August that we are really able to see these fawns, and that's the period of time that we-that's the protocol-that's the period of time that we have to look for fawns and does. If we look for them earlier we won't see them because they're either not born or they're hiding too much, and if we look for them later they lose their spots, and so they start to look like adult female deer, does we call them. So it's important to follow the protocol, to follow the rules, about when to look for fawns and does because we as researchers know when to expect to find those and if we can look for at the same time each year, in the same way each year, the same time of day each year, like for the bird stuff too then you build up a dataset where you have this consistency from year to year and across the state and that is what leads to a very strong dataset to help us draw conclusions about what is going on with the deer population, the bird populations and for, you know, these citizen science projects that these students are able to participate in.
Mickenzee: Definitely yeah that's so cool that we get to be part of research like that. This third grader asks: when scientists count birds, how do they know they're not counting the same birds over and over? And moreover how do scientists know that the animals they're observing are the same animal or different animals?
Jen: yeah great question I guess I'll start with the first part of that, and Mickenzee you might know more about this than I do because like I said I'm not a bird person so feel free to add to this too, but I know one way that bird researchers count birds is using point count methods and this is really cool. A researcher has to know so much about the different birds and use just their listening skills and an incredible way. When they get to a spot to collect this sort of data, so a researcher would follow the protocol, they'd go to a specific place at a specific time and just listen for birds for a certain amount of time, and it's usually a pretty short amount of time maybe five minutes and while they're doing that everything is quiet. They might also bring a recorder so they'd be able to kind of go back later and and check to see if they were hearing the right things
and they are actually using their ears to listen directionally to hear “okay there's one bird of this species over there to my right” and they record that. And there might even be two people doing this at the same time so they're even checking each other and “then a bird right behind me and I hear that and I'm going to record that and then two birds in front of me and I'm recorded those and they're different species so I know that there are different bird altogether.” And by having a short period of time you can sort of guarantee that the birds are going to stay where they are it's not perfect because birds move around, but you wouldn't want to do this over the course of an hour what I call this in my research is closure, and you don't have closure if you have too much time or too much space because the animals can then move around, but by doing this point count at a very short period of time at one specific location specific time of the day and listening to the different directions the animals are the birds are from you you can identify those individuals. I think that's how point counts work, I haven't actually done one because I don't know my bird detection very well. But it's not always important I would say that you need to know exactly the individuals, so maybe for point counts you do maybe for some survey methods you do I'll go to trail cameras again because again that's what I do and on trail cameras we get the benefit of seeing the animals walk by and if you see an animal walk by you know exactly where that was and what time that happened so if there's another say I saw a bobcat on one camera at this this time and at this camera and then I saw another bobcat another camera and it was at the same time I know those are different because they're a different spaces bobcats though are also a good example because they have a pattern on their coats that is different and unique by individuals hopefully on the zooniverse classification you see a bobcat now and then and sometimes their coats can look almost one solid color like almost like a house cat or something that are just kind of a solid color and other times they look almost like a cheetah with these really you know unique blobs all over them and they especially have like a striping on their legs that can be very unique that inner leg and we can get photos of that to actually tell one individual from another and there's computer software and computer programs using machine learning that can automatically do this too, tell you the different individuals. Another example are for deer deer have deer males the bucks they grow antlers every year and those antlers can look really different from one buck to another, they have different number of tines they have different looks on the left versus the right side some of them have irregular growths that really help you and it's not perfect and none of this ID is perfect but that can help you tell who is who
Mickenzee: yeah give you an idea yeah
Jen: Yeah and then in Wildlife Research we also do things and I know in birds too we do things to mark birds researchers can mark birds that can put tags and bands on birds and so you can have a bird in hand and it's been tagged as you know exactly who that bird was and where they were at least where they were caught maybe if there were then located a different areas too
Turkey hen with poults (photo by USFWS)
and we put transmitters on wildlife too. Right now we have a project going in Wisconsin where we are putting these backpacks on turkeys and these backpacks give us a GPS location of these different hens every hour of the day. And some of them have poults with them and so we're interested in tracking these hens and the poult and also getting pictures of them on trail cameras and in that case it's really important for us to know who is who, which individual, which hen has that brood poults with her. But then for most of what we do with our trail camera stuff we don't really need to know what unique individual it is which deer it is that just walked in front of our camera we have statistical methods, models and calculations, that we use to summarize the data so we get in some cases just a maximum number of does, female deer, and one photo of that week in that location say so then we summarize the data in a way that we know we have no more than two does in that week because we got them in the same trigger so we know those are two Unique Individuals and then we have models that we use that use that kind of information that does not require marked animals to track the populations.
Mickenzee: Okay yeah, so like science is a lot of science and research is a lot of checking your work making sure that if someone else was trying to do the same research as you could repeat it again and that's so cool. I want to say thank you to the third graders for submitting their questions and thank you Jen for coming on to teach us today.
Jen: Thank you so much it was great to be here. Great questions.
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If you are interested in learning more about research or getting involved with our programs please head to our website swibirds.org to check out free lessons games and activities like our lesson on How to Be a Bear Scientist as well as the event calendar and citizen science programs like the Christmas Bird Count. If you're curious about Snapshot Wisconsin head to the link in the episode description and get started identifying animals with just a few clicks.
If you have a big nature question that you'd like to have answered please have a grown-up or your teacher submit your question to info at swibirds.org with the title ‘Questions for QuACK’. Make sure to include your grade and the school that you attend so I can give you a shout out. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you join us next time on QuACK.
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Audio Editing and Transcription by Mickenzee Okon
Logo design by Carolyn Byers and Kaitlin Svabek
Music: “The Forest and the Trees” by Kevin MacLeod
