Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Making a List of Mid-Atlantic Rarities

Well, the final end-goal of this project is yet to be realized (will post here in a few weeks about it), BUT I just wanted to share this spreadsheet in case others were interested. It is a list of all 508 species seen in Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia along with their ebird frequency in each state. I also added a 'weighted' summary column in order to average all numbers together. My goal in creating this was to see if ebird could help me draw the line at what is considered a 'regional' rarity. I'm still deciding exactly where to draw the line. I'll likely pick somewhere between #200 and #250 and then manually add/subtract a few.  Another use for this, would be to quickly check which nearby states have records of which species. For example, if you were creating a "next top 10 list" for potential first state records, something like this would be extremely handy. Long term, I will probably add a few more states to this or maybe even make a "East of US spreadsheet"


Link to excel spreadsheet


If anyone is curious - this was the key excel formula in lining up checklist percentages from one state to another.

=IF(ISNUMBER(INDEX(R:R,MATCH($A1,Q:Q,0))),INDEX(R:R,MATCH($A1,Q:Q,0)),0)

The formula gathers the species name from A1 and then looks for a match in Column Q. If it finds a match, then it returns the adjacent value in column R.



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