Relationship between Water Quality and Diversity of Bird Populations​ In New York City

Group Members: Raisa Rahman, Justin Jacob, Miriam Perel

Our question for this poster was “is there a relationship between water quality and bird biodiversity?” We came up with this question because we were thinking about human water consumption the week prior which led to talks about how other living things, other than humans, also need water to survive. We chose birds as the “living thing” we wanted to study because data for birds is much easier to come by on the Macaulay Bioblitz database and the eBird database when compared to other species. We obtained water pH and ammonia readings for 21 different water sites from 2000-2021 from NYC Open Data, which Figure 1 shows. We specifically chose pH and ammonia measurements as those were the most abundant measurements that were found in the data. Based on all this, our initial hypothesis was that extreme pH and ammonia values would lead to poorer biodiversity.

To test this, we used Microsoft Excel to analyze our data. We found the correlation coefficient, ‘r,’ for both scenarios: r = 0.133 for the pH study, as shown in Figure 3, and r = 0.316 for the ammonia study, as shown in Figure 4. This told us that there was a very weak correlation between pH of water sources and the number of bird species around that source. For ammonia, there was a stronger correlation than pH, but not enough for us to confidently say that there is a strong relationship. To find this confidence, we proposed more specific studies of bird species, focusing on 2 to 3 abundant species in New York City, to track their movement and population growth throughout the city’s main bodies of water. Also, refining which specific water sources we’re collecting data from would help find stronger, more localized conclusions. This brings upon the challenge that the aspects of water that are being measured are not standardized between every water collection site, this would result in the reduction of factors we can consider for water quality. So, rather than relying on public data, we ourselves can go out with certain features of the water in mind and test for that to improve our dataset for a future experiment.

View a PDF of our poster.