EMS Project: Maps galore

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working ridiculously hard with my old pal GIS trying to formulate some maps and whatnot for the EMS project I am currently working on. Thus far I have created a few maps with general species abundances (it looks very messy and almost looked like a child's birthday party, i.e. with a lot of brightly coloured 'balloons' all over the shop).

AVERAGE bird abundances and distribution per site, there are six.
N.B. Legend not present due to crazy amount of data. It needed messing with.

Pushing that aside (for now), I decided to have a look at recreational activities both from the Excel spreadsheet and the photocopied annotated survey sheets so I could gauge approximate distribution of activity per site. Again, I've done this using the large 1:50,000 OS map to look at the generalised picture rather than each localised site...

That's better with a legend.

I can use these shapefiles for the localised maps since they're pretty much in the right locations anyway. I may have to have a fiddle around with some mind. I was also thinking of splitting up the EMS activity maps into two - shore-based recreational activities and water-based recreational activities. Then there would have to be one for fishing/harvesting/collecting since there are a few sea coal collectors, bait diggers, anglers [well, one] etc.

We'll see.

I need to create the shapefiles now for bird counts at the start and the end of each survey and to locate these on the localised maps. Then, somehow, I need to map on recreational disturbance. I'm sure I can fathom this out... There's a clever person hiding somewhere inside...

EMS project: Becoming reacquainted with my friend GIS.

I can't tell you how long I've been wanting to start a little 'diary' of my analytical project that is currently underway. Many moons ago [it seems!] I stated that I had to do a research project as required by my MSc and this was to be done with an external organisation. As I've mentioned a fair few times, I chose to do mine with the EMS management team, specifically working with INCA, Natural England, and the RSPB. I've been officially working on the project for a month now though, unfortunately, have been getting nowhere. I had to wait for data to be sent, I had issues installing my good friend ArcGIS onto my laptop (I even bought myself a new laptop for this purpose), and then there was the issue of me actually becoming reacquainted with the programme. Phew!

My main point of contact for the project has been Maeve, the current EMS project officer and she's brilliant. I think she's received many e-mails/texts/rambles fuelled by frustration, coffee, and on one occasion beer, asking for advice on how to get the data into GIS. I was just not having a good time with it. Essentially I need to create separate shapefiles for each species, both at the start and the end of the bird count surveys. This way I can map abundances. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the end counts just yet, I think that'll be another "please give me some advice" e-mail, but at present I was just using the 'average' values to get a general idea of the prevalence of bird species at each of the six sites (Hartlepool North Sands, North Gare, South Gare, Redcar Rocks, Seaton Snook, and Bran Sands). Then, alongside this, I'm going to display their likely activity (either feeding or roosting) based on the sum of averages. It gets a little complicated so it's just going to be as a % representation (I think, I'll see how it goes).

The other wall that I hit was to do with getting this data actually into GIS. Those who know me, I'm always trying to better what I've done. I'm never happy with it - perfectionism, it's a blessing and a curse at the same time. Anyway, the way that the previous EMS officer, Katherine, had input the data was manually, inserting each value into each field one by one. Given that I am playing with what, about 600 points per species (if you consider that there are about 10 fields per value as well) I wasn't too happy with manually inputting this data, one by one. Cue a lot of googling and e-mailing GIS 'experts' to try and see whether I could do this. The only solution I could think of was saving a spreadsheet as a database (thank goodness for Open Office, Microsoft Office doesn't do the database extension anymore) and importing this into GIS via the XY (coordinates). The data I had been given didn't have coordinates, and that is why the data had previously been input manually so that each record could be placed where it needed to be on the map. 

A few days of wanting to throw my laptop out of the window, I had a solution. I grabbed the XY coordinates off GIS for each of the six sites, assigned them to the appropriate values, and then imported the data in and just smushed around the values myself. Looking back I probably should have done this first off but clearly my noggin didn't want to cooperate. 

Phew!

As a little bit of GIS-practice, I wanted to recreate the European Marine Site (EMS)/ Special Protection Area (SPA)  boundary map that I had found. I gathered the SPA data from the JNCC website, opened up my two 1:50,000 OS maps downloaded off Digimap and had a play around. I couldn't find any EMS GIS data and I didn't fancy recreating the polygon shapes myself so I made a duplicate SPA-boundary file and edited the vertices to delete any that weren't part of the EMS. It all sounds very complicated but I knew what I was doing. Threw on a title, a legend, a North arrow, and a scale bar and voila. My first little map produced for a while. 

Simple, but it made me very happy.

So, now that I've had a really good play around with this and that (pressing far too many buttons for my liking and probably wrecking havoc to the data - only messing, I know what I'm doing!) I feel like I at least have a little bit of knowledge and confidence that I can work with the data. It just took a little while to get going, that's all.

I guess this kind of reiterates that old mantra, "never give up". It's true, you'll get there in the end. 

Teesmouth & Cleveland Coast EMS: Bird disturbance surveys with Natural England.

I know it hasn't been long since my last update but I should really talk about my trip to Redcar before I get too busy (or maybe I am just using this as a useful procrastination tool... who knows?) Anyway, I have mentioned it before in a previous post but alas I shall repeat myself (hey, it beats reading a rather dry paper about IUU fishing... I need to find a better one) - As part of my MSc in Marine Environmental Management I have to undertake a 8-10 week project placement (not work experience per se, but a project) where I do research and subsequently write it up into a 5000 word report (essentially another dissertation). Well, I was in a little bit of a predicament with what I should go for and in the end I decided to go with Natural England (and INCA) and do a project assessing the impacts of recreational activities on the overwintering and migratory birds at the Teesmouth and Cleveland Coast European Marine Site (EMS). This would mainly be through the use of spatial analysis (ArcGIS) and statistical analysis (oh joy ~ I can use either SPSS or, if I feel confident in doing so, 'R'). Well, after contacting the current EMS project officer, Katherine (who is sadly leaving at the start of next month) we decided on a date to go over some of the methodology and meet with some of the team, mainly to introduce myself and get some direction for my actual placement.

So, Tuesday morning I got up bright and early, jumped in the shower and made myself look quite respectable (I opted for practicality, comfort and a little bit of style if that's what you'd call it). I wasn't at all sure of the weather (come on, it's England, we can have all seasons in an hour) so boots and leather jacket it was. I wolfed down some breakfast (thank you lifesaver of a boyfriend), grabbed my Kindle for some light reading on the train (Little Women) shoved this and that into my bag and proceeded to train station with about 10-15 minutes to go. Note: This was during rush hour in York, i.e. very very busy indeed, particularly coming through one of the main roads into York... Still, I made it with about 5 minutes to spare (another big thank you to boyfriend who played taxis that morning) and flopped on the train for an hour and 5.

I met with Katherine at Middlesbrough station and we made our way to Redcar Rocks or Redcar 'Scars' as it is commonly known. We took a walk down the beach and set up just before the development of flood defence structures and just before the actual rocks.

Redcar Scars - flood defence development to the right

Behind where we took the bird surveys from - vertical pier, coastal area regeneration.

The scope was set up, binoculars were at hand and survey sheets were out - Katherine showed me how the methodology was actually done for the two hour survey (in summer, just one hour in winter was sufficient). It was important to do a bird count (species present and abundances of each) before the survey started. Species we were looking for included: cormorant, curlew, dunlin, knot, oystercatcher, purple sandpiper, redshank, ringed plover, sanderling, turnstone and then we could mark down other species. During the actual surveying of bird disturbances, we had to record the number of humans in and around the area, what they were doing (i.e. dog walking, angling, diving, bait digging, horse riding etc) and whether their activities disturbed any of the birds and to what extent. It was quite interesting anyway.
 

Redcar Scars - beautiful beach.

In the middle of our survey Catherine and Martin joined us from Natural England and I briefly introduced myself and we had a bit of a chat about the project. We then had a quick drive to another site where we could see the Corus Steelworks. They were pretty magnificent I have to admit. I didn't manage to get a photo of the whole site (or maybe I did, I'll have a root through my phone) but the whole of the area was covered (and I mean covered) in grass from the sand dunes. It was remarkable that a whole ecosystem, a stable ecosystem had successfully established on the waste products of such industry.

Redcar Corus Steelworks and the South Gare (I think?) sand dunes, an ecosystem built on the slag (waste products) from the industry.

We had a bit of a walk down Coatham Sands, Bran Sands and South Gare (it was extremely windy but pretty tranquil and the weather was perfect) and I really was in awe with the scenery. Unfortunately we arrived at this site at mid-tide so it was neither high or low tide. We couldn't actually do a survey due to this, however we did spot several hundred oystercatcher roosting on an exposed area of rock.

Once we had finished having a look around this site, we quickly piled in the car and head towards one of the booked rooms where we could meet Mike (also from Natural England), do the formal introductions to him and the rest of the team and discuss which direction I could take my placement. I still need to have a proper think about this but I have plenty of time. I then sat through their meeting reviewing the methodology and assessing whether aspects of it needed changing (simplification, replicates, further investigations etc). We then discussed my project and what I need out of it regarding the MSc assignment (I said I didn't know, Rach just forgot to check the VLE didn't she? Silly thing!) and I sat through their discussion of Katherine's Code of Conduct (CoC) that she had formulated - it looked great! It was a voluntary CoC for all recreational users of the beach, highlighting the problems of their activity, recommendations for where they should do it (i.e. further up the beach, away from feeding birds etc) and other considerations. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it even if I did go a little quiet when it came to discussing improvements. Still, it was a great experience for me to sit through a typical EMS meeting like that.

I'm currently in the process of penning an e-mail to those I met on Tuesday thanking them for the day and giving them a little more information on what my project requires and although it states that this is not work experience I would definitely like to get some work experience alongside doing my project. I mean, hey, I might not get a chance like this again!