Instructions: This semester you will complete a project using one of the data sets below. The project requires you to work with a team. Team assignments are listed on the Blackboard site for this class. Aspects of the project will be explained on problem sets as the semester progresses.
Here are links to the data sets that you may use for your project. If you have access to another data set that you think might be suitable and you would like to use it, please let the instructors know. However, it must be approved by an instructor before you are allowed to use it.
ProMod Team Data Set and Website: ProMod groups will all work on the Farm to School data sets. The data has been or will be provided to you, and the website has additional information.
Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count Data Set: This website provides a gateway to over 100 years of data from a bird census done every year in December. At the top of the page, under “Historical,” you can obtain census of all the birds in various regions (countries, states, provinces and even smaller regions), or all the information about a particular species. The website walks you through your query(-ies) of the data set, and you can export the data in Excel, pdf, csv or other file formats.
Isle Royale Wolf-Moose System: On the right-hand side bar of this page, look for “Graph Data.” Under this heading it says, “Download an Excel file containing the data for each of the graphs on this page.” Underneath that is a download button. Click it and you will download a very extensive data set that includes, among other things, population and demographic data on wolves and moose, climate data and data on the island’s balsam fir population for every year from 1959 through 2011.
National Phenology Network: This phenomenal data set has information on the times and dates of significant biological events–flowering of certain plants, arrival of certain species of birds, etc–from locations all over the U.S. through time. On this page you have a filter that will allow you to build a smaller data set from this enormous database. I encourage you to explore both “summarized data,” which tallies the first and last dates of these events in different years and locations, and the “raw data,” which provides much more detail, and therefore allows more creativity on your team’s part. Climate data is also available, and you can use this just to study changes in climate. To obtain the data, you will have to provided an email address (use your ASU address), but when you do it will download a csv file directly to your computer. The csv file type is readable by any spreadsheet software.
