Scarlett Oliva

From Penguins to Egrets

Presentation by Scott Jennings
Piner High School Planetarium
2/13/23

I attended a Stem Cafe at Piner High Schools Planetarium on January 12, 2023.
I went to the Cafe with an open mind because I had no prior knowledge of the subject
and wanted to learn more about it. Scott Jennings opened the cafe by introducing
himself. I learned a little about how he was always interested in animals and nature,
which is why he went into environmental sciences. He is a member of a group that does
research and studies on ecology and conservation science in San Francisco and the
bay area. Conservation science is the collection of knowledge about the natural world
through monitoring and research and the transformation of that information into
recommendations for conservation and good landscape management. Their goal is to
create an ecosystem in which we can all live. He was referring to a healthy ecosystem,
which consists of a cycling of energy and matter with many diverse cycling patterns,
rather than a random collection of plants and animals.
Scott Jennings then began to discuss the many changes in the ecosystem and
how birds may reveal a lot about how the ecosystem evolves. They utilize birds to
demonstrate environmental changes because they are usually loud and colorful, making
them easier to track. They also use them to track since they perform a variety of
functions in the ecosystem. Because we have lost about 3 billion birds in the last 50
years, these birds demonstrated that something was amiss in the ecosystem.
There were two types of areas of science that he uses. He started off by talking
about monitoring. Monitoring is counting birds for his projects, and they come back
every month or year and keep on counting birds. Monitoring programs are very easy,
and you keep on doing the same thing so that you can keep on getting data. You could
see the change in population and this is important because without this you won't know
how or when to take action for the concern of the population. The main point of
monitoring is to detect changes in a cycle. After getting a bit of data after years you can
finally get to see the change in the ecosystem and start forming questions. The next
area of science that he talked about was research. This was an area where they detect
and describe the change in the environment and ecosystem. This research would be
able to find the cause of these changes. To do this they need a more targeted research
project so that they can have a specific question that they want to answer and go out
and collect data to answer this question.
Scott Jennings then went on to discuss the projects in which he is involved. To
begin, they go out and try to find birds, which they accomplish by gathering them in a
net because it is the simplest way for them to be caught. The birds are then attached
with GPS tracking devices to trace their migration. He discovered that certain birds like
to stay in a fixed location, but others move outside of the normal range and travel
further. They discovered that they return to where they started; they take loops during
the seasons due to the various conditions.
This talk taught me a lot about things I didn't know before. This is not a topic I
would normally be interested in because I have never been drawn to environmental
sciences. That's why I found it more interesting because I wasn't expecting to learn so
much. What I was most interested in learning about were the new projects that they had
been working on. I had no idea they went to such lengths to obtain such information. I
assumed it would be simple to get, but it actually takes years to start collecting data and
seeing patterns within it. It made me think about how many things in the world appear to
be simple to do, yet are actually difficult and time-consuming. Scott Jennings also
generated a variety of questions about this topic like, How is the population of birds
rising or decreasing? What can we do to assist these birds? What is causing the
population decreases of certain bird species? All of these questions were to be
considered throughout the presentation, but they were never answered, leaving me to
wonder and ponder them.
Scott Jennings is involved in so many different projects, and I'm curious where he
got the idea to be involved in so many. Where did the idea of putting GPS on birds
come from? It's a clever idea, in my opinion. They are utilizing technology to better their
understanding of bird migration. I'm curious whether they could do this to species other
than birds. This talk made me think a lot about these different topics and inspired me to
come up with my own questions. Although this lecture was pretty informative, it was
also extremely difficult to comprehend. He utilized a variety of graphs and terminology
that was difficult to understand. Overall, I believe that attending this presentation was
worthwhile because I learned something that I would not have learned otherwise. This
forced me to step outside of my comfort zone, as I would not normally want to learn
about environmental sciences.
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Published February 2, 2023
BirdFlow software anticipates migratory patterns of birds
https://www.birdwatchingdaily.com/news/science/birdflow-software-anticipates-migratory
-patterns-of-birds/
This article is about bird migration and the new technologies that they are using
to track this migration. This connects to the presentation because the presenter had a
project in which he was putting GPS systems on birds. In ths article they describe a
better and more efficient way to track miggrating bird .In partnership with biologists at
the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst developed a new prediction model capable of precisely anticipating where a
migrating bird will go next. This is different from Scott Jennings method because his
method tagged and monitored individual birds, but it is difficult to physically tag enough
birds to generate a complete enough image to forecast bird movements. Tracking
methods only reveal the routes that birds caught in specifBirdFlow can effectively
anticipate migratory movements in the absence of real-time GPS and satellite tracking
data, making it a vital tool for tracking species that may otherwise go unnoticed
locations took, not how birds caught in completely different locales would move.