Mapping social structures of condors
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I would guess that that one of the project scientists has already thought of this idea, but I would like to suggest it anyways.
If you have a contour map for the area surrounding each of the cameras, using where animals are marked, you can project in three dimensions where observed animals are. Besides this being an incredibly cool use of technology, using the tag information and biographies, you could map out the social structures of condors. For example, studying whether there are social cliques determined by age, gender, or whether their skin has turned pink-orange yet. Another fun experiment might be to see if condors that have had lead poisoning are socially excluded.Also, on the condor-to-condor level, using contour maps to project in three dimensions would allow the project scientists to study condor association more finely.
Anyways, I hope that the project scientists consider my suggestions, if they are not already using this method of analysis.
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by
myraf
scientist
That is a very interesting idea! I have sent your comment to Dai, our social network expert. We are planning on creating social networks of the birds and looking at how lead poisoning alters this network but we haven't discussed contour maps and I am not sure if Dai is thinking about using them. As an FYI, next week's blog post is going to be from Dai and talk about the social network analysis. Thank you for your idea and also for your help with Condor Watch! Keep the ideas coming - we love input!
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Thanks for your feedback!
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