The Effects of Precipitation on Bird Diversity during the Nesting Season in the NYC Metropolitan Area

For our project, we decided to research whether or not precipitation affects bird diversity in the NY metropolitan area. We first looked at how the average amount of precipitation in a day affects bird diversity in the Metropolitan area in the month of May. After some research from previous experiments done, we found that the correlation varies depending on the season- there is a negative correlation between precipitation amount and bird species richness during the nesting season and a positive correlation between bird species richness and precipitation during other times of the year. From that, we hypothesized that there would be a lower number of species observed with increased precipitation for our experiment because of our focus on the month of May. We collected bird data from eBird, which had a count of the number of bird species observed on Big Day in May. We collected precipitation data from NOAA, where we got the average amount of precipitation per day in the month of May in the NY Metropolitan Area. Our data was consolidated into 6 points that showed the overall precipitation per county for 2015-2020. The results showed weak correlations between the precipitation and bird diversity overall. Overall 3 of the 6 graphs had a slight negative correlation in which as precipitation increased bird diversity decreased, 2 graphs showed no correlation and one graph showed a slight positive correlation whereas precipitation increased bird diversity increased. From this, we concluded that there seems to be little correlation between bird diversity and precipitation, at least in the 6 years we graphed.
However, these are not enough data points to actually gain a significant finding from and we would definitely need to study more data points in order to reach a significant conclusion. We suggested expanded the sample size for the next study in order to gather more data points and gain a broader understanding of precipitation’s effects on bird diversity. We also suggest studying a larger range of years (as we only studied 2015-2020) to remedy the lack of data issue and make this study representative of bird diversity across time
-Sameeha Malikah, Mahmud Hasan, Hannah Shulman, and Ashley George