🦉Kentucky's Eight Owls
A Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) gliding over a meadow.
Photo by Chirs Hill -
Adobe Stock #61252701.
A Short-Eared Owl (Asio flammeus) on a fence pole in the meadows of Noord Brabant near Rosmalen in the
Netherlands.
Photo by henk bogaard -
Adobe
Stock #210749054
A portrait of a Long-Eared Owl (Asio otus), also known as the northern long-eared owl, the lesser horned owl
or cat owl as it sits perched in a tree cautiously staring and alert.
Photo by alan1951 -
Adobe
Stock #432460986
This tiny owl is a Northern Saw-Whet Owl (Aegolius acadicus).
Photo by Megan Lorenz -
Adobe Stock #18360777
A Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus) flying low hunting over an open sunny snowy cornfield in Ottawa, Canada.
Photo by jimcumming88 -
Adobe
Stock #245155139
Going Beyond Kentucky's Owls:
We continue our study of owls with this final project for the MAP 672: Programming For Web
Mapping
course at the
University of Kentucky. Previously, I mapped Snowy Owls to
meet
the final project requirements for
MAP671, and I discovered that these animals are capable of flying as far as Hawai`i in search of
food. Eight species of owls can be observed in the great state of Kentucky, with Snowy Owls, though rare
visitors to the commonwealth, making their appearance from time to time.
Together with Snowy Owls, Short-Eared and Northern Saw-Whet Owls visit Kentucky from their home ranges.
Snowy Owls aren't technically migratory, but the other two are winter migrants. The remaining five owl
species, the Great Horned Owls, Barred Owls, Barn Owls, Eastern Screech Owls, and Long-Eared Owls, are
all natives to Kentucky.
Though these birds are not currently endangered, their numbers are declining due to habitat destruction and
the not-so-green "green energy"
practices of solar farms, biomass
powerplants, and wind farms. Environmental pollution also threatens the future of owls. Furthermore, the
quest for clean air, which is inherently a noble cause, has a dark side. Electric Vehicles use batteries
that require various rare earth minerals to function. Growing demand for these minerals requires a
tremendous increase in mining operations that threatens the environment and the interconnected ecosystems
from pollution and the destruction of habitats. For example, mining the seabed for raw materials has
the potential to cause devastating effects on the food chain, which can endanger all life, not just our
feathered friends.
Studying the splendour of the natural world and advocating for conservation is rewarding. It brings
much-needed awareness to the inner workings of various policy efforts, which sound good on the surface.
Advances in electric vehicles wouldn't be where they are today if not the result of strip mining Mother
Earth for her natural resources. To meet the demand for more batteries, lithium
mining alone requires moving more tons of earth (resulting in environmental destruction) than mining
coal. Still, as we dig deeper (no pun intended), we learn that the green movement isn't as green as
the intertwined corporate and government sponsors will have us believe. When hundreds of billions
of dollars are tied up in government subsidies, you can rest assured that truth in advertising is one
of the first casualties.
Owls are but a small part of the natural world, and Kentucky is a small corner of our natural world. This
simple mapping project highlights that both elements are interconnected with other ecosystems and physical
geographies. We need to better safeguard the environment for ourselves and future generations by holding the
cabal of government, corporate, and media interests accountable every time they lie to us about protecting
our environment. We only have one chance to get it right, and we should feel compelled to take action.
Project Notes:
Tools, citations, and methodology used in this project:
- All software tools used in this project were ran on the FreeBSD
13-RELEASE-p7
Operating
System.
- QGIS 3.24.1-Tisler was
used
to inspect data, crop eBird.org data, and perform format conversions of Shapefiles to GeoJSON.
- Visual Studio Code - Open Source ("Code
- OSS")
1.64.2 was used for all coding with the following plugins installed: Beautify, Code
Runner, and Live
Server.
- Code from Leaflet 1.7.1 used to create
the interactive webmap.
- Owl range and predicted range data comes from eBird.org in collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell
University.
Fink, D., T. Auer, A. Johnston, M. Strimas-Mackey, O. Robinson, S. Ligocki, W. Hochachka,
L. Jaromczyk, C. Wood, I. Davies, M. Iliff, L. Seitz. 2021. eBird Status and Trends, Data Version: 2020;
Released: 2021. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York.
- eBird's data comes as Shapefiles of varying levels of resolution depending on resesearch requirements.
Due to the size of some of the data files, the data was run through MapShaper to simplify and reduce the size of the data files.
- Shapefile for the North America Political Boundaries map comes from USGS ScienceBase-Catalog.
Shapefile was converted to a GeoJSON in QGIS for use as a webmap.
- Kentucky boundary was extracted from the US Census Bureau’s TIGER/Line
Geodatabase.
- The map uses the ESRI 102321 NAD 1983 High Accuracy Regional
Network (HARN) State Plane North Dakota (South) FIPS 3302 Lambert Conformal Conic projection and centred
on Center, North Dakota which
coincidently happens to be the geographical centre of North America!
- Code from Proj4js v2.8.0 is used to change
default map projection from WGS84 to EPSG 102321.
- Code from Proj4Leaflet v1.0.2 is used to enable
Proj4js in Leaflet.
- Colour scheme for the map legend was chosen with the aid of ColorBrewer2.org to ensure
legibility for individuals with colour blindness.
- Adobe Stock photos with open or
educational licensing
were used for illustrative and educational purposes with attribution and links to the
original sources as applicable.
- The GIMP v2.10.30 was used to reduce the resolution and file size
the stock photos to speed loading times.
- Data accessed 26 March 2022.
