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Dear Soddy Mountain Hawk Watch,
My name is Brian M. Wargo and I chair the Data Committee for the Hawk Migration Association of North America (HMANA). In addition, I am the Eastern Flyway editor for Hawk Migration Studies. In order to write the Eastern Flyway reports each season, I analyze the data uploaded to hawkcount.org from over a hundred hawk sites from the Atlantic coast towards the Mississippi River.
In order to make sense of the data, I make a graphical representation for each hawk site using a 20-year sample. I am sending your site’s analysis as a PDF file for review. This is what I use to write the Eastern Flyway report, so let me know if there is something that I missed. Seeing the general trends in a graph often helps to verify or challenge our notions of what is happening from season to season. To help understand some of the finer points of the analysis, I have included instructions on reading the data at the end of this letter.
If your site has less than twenty years of data, there will be gaps in the data table and in the graphs. That is fine…but please keep adding data each year to help fill in this vital information. Also, if you have data that you have not entered into hawkcount.org, please try to do so. This includes data that is older than the twenty years shown in the charts, for I analyze all of the data, as far back as it takes me.
This analysis is just part of what HMANA does in service of raptors. Your data is invaluable to our overall understanding of raptor populations and HMANA thanks you for your efforts. HMANA is a mainly volunteer group of scientists, citizen scientists, hawkwatchers, and laypersons whose explicit goal is advancing scientific knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of raptor migration. If you are not a member or a contributor, please consider becoming one at www.hmana.org. Your membership helps us produce:
-Hawk Migration Studies—the premier citizen science journal for hawkwatching
-hawkcount.org—HMANA’s national database site for hawk counting
-Raptor Population Index—statistically validated population trends for raptors
-HMANA’s Research Awards, the Junior Hawkwatcher Program, HMANA’s Hawk Watch Grants, HMANA’s Hawkwatching Tours, and much more.
Have a great hawkwatching season and we look forward to seeing your numbers!
Sincerely,
Brian M. Wargo, Ph.D.
Eastern FlywayEditor – Hawk Migration Studies
Director – Hawk Migration Association of North America (HMANA)
Chair of the Data Committee (HMANA)
Chair of the Education and Conservation Committee (HMANA)
28916 Millbrook Rd. Farmington Hills MI 48334
www.hmana.org
How to Read the Analysis:
To read the table at the top portion of the page, a green to red gradient allows for a quick view of the highest count year (dark green) to the lowest (dark red). At the bottom of the table, there are summary statistics that show the average values for each species over the years. This is followed by how this year compares to an average year.
The pie charts located below the table shows the composition of the most common hawks at your site for both the Fall of 2019 and then for the twenty-year average. All of the scatter plots following the pie charts have five fine dashed lines. The middle-dashed line shows the mean or average value. The dashed line above and below the mean line represents one standard deviation, while the outside dashed lines represent an additional standard deviation. One standard deviation represents 68% of the data in a normally distributed system, while two standard deviations represents 95%.
The R2 value is the correlation coefficient and marks the goodness of fit for a linear function. An R2 value of 1.0000 indicates a perfect fit of your data to a line, whereas an R2 value of 0.0000 shows that the data points are seemingly random and have no linear fit.
(print info excluded).
KEEP LOOKING UP!!!!
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