Our study focused on the research question of how the proximity of bodies of water contributes to the species richness of birds between the 5 boroughs of NYC.
We were able to examine this relationship between a location’s proximity to a body of water and how rich the species count is in that location by noting down hotspots that EBird has defined.
Hotspots are locations where people can report their bird sightings and essentially have an approximation of the number of species in that specific location. Now, we hypothesized that “as a hotspot location is closer to a body of water, the more bird species are found in that location”.
We were able to work through this hypothesis by choosing a good amount of locations scattered throughout NYC. We chose 16, all distributed among categories depending on how close they are to the water. In all 3 figures you can see, green is close to water, yellow is semi-close, and red is far from water. What we found was that according to this bar graph here, there’s a decreasing linear trend line among the locations as they are located further away from bodies of water, which supports our hypothesis.
Our final conclusion was that similar to past research, our study supports the idea that specific properties of bodies of water affect the species richness of birds. This paves the way for the potential incentive that federal and state policymakers in the environmental protection sector could take and consider in protecting locations or areas in New York City.
