Canine Conversations

In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Dr. Charles Van Rees about data. They discuss the ins and outs of working with data and how to turn data into information scientists can use.Episode suggestion: Take the time to see, smell, and notice things outside! Call to action: Check out ebird, inaturalist or seek! What is/are data? Information that we can use for inference and for learning things Data doesn’t necessarily “teach you things” but it helps you learn an answer to something you’re looking for Examples of data for conservation science Occurrence data: evidence of the occurrence of a species in a specific area Abundance data: identifying and counting every individual of every species in a given sector Time series data: a series of data points indexed in time order Monitoring: the process of watching the changes and patterns in the species Challenges in data collection Biases in both humans vs dogs Dogs have less of a visual bias than humans as they rely on olfactory vs