Long-term ecological monitoring data from New Zealand (and elsewhere), 2003–2017 (Draft)

The natural environment is changing rapidly in response to human land use changes, species invasions, and climate changes. This dataset is my contribution to documenting these changes.<br><br>It includes my observations since 2003 along many repeatedly travelled transects, as well as one-off site surveys. Using standardised methods, I count birds, mammals (mostly as roadkill), and selected invertebrates (including all butterflies), plants (including flowering phenology), fungi, and other species. I live in Christchurch, New Zealand, and work in the nearby town of Lincoln, New Zealand, so most observations are in this area. <br><br>Be warned that the data available here is in an unfinished state. I am making it available now (Dec. 2017) as insurance should something happen to me. My observations are a combination of time-stamped and geotagged audio notes (made while cycling or running) and text notes entered in a shorthand of my own design (fully documented here). The audio notes are being transcribed into the same shorthand format and I am close to completing the R scripts that will expand out the shorthand into a full dataset. There will be over a million observations available once the transcription and translation is complete.<br><br>The recording period includes a variety of both graduated and punctuated environmental changes in the wider Christchurch area. These include the devastating Christchurch earthquakes of 2010–2011, a large increase in traffic volumes and housing in Christchurch's satellite towns like Lincoln especially since the earthquakes, the largest local snow storm in a century in July 2011, a massive fire in the Christchurch Port Hills in February 2017, and a five-fold increase in dairy cows and associated irrigation in the surrounding farmland.<br><br>Collecting and curating these observations has been a massive undertaking and I have outlines for a number of publications on trends from the data. If you plan on using it for your research, please contact me first ([e-mail]). You'll benefit from my help interpreting the data and I'd appreciate being considered for authorship on publications that make substantial use of this data.<br><br>I plan to update this dataset as it grows and as I make progress on the curation, transcription, and translation of the data.<br><br>The photos and audio recordings referred to comments on my observations are online at http://naturewatch.org.nz/observations/jon_sullivan (and http://inaturalist.org/observations/jon_sullivan). (If they're not, they're part of my backlog that I'm still uploading.)<br><br>I described an earlier version of the methods used in Sullivan, J. J. 2012. Recording birds in real time: a convenient method for frequent bird recording. New Zealand Journal of Ecology, 36:416–424. (http://newzealandecology.org/nzje/3057)<br><br>The Filemaker Go app I built to record all my observations is available on Github at https://github.com/mjon/Watcher