Most of my afternoon today was spent in #QGIS with one of my Masters students Dee Patel. We're preparing my long-term bird monitoring data around Christchurch, NZ, for analysis. Today we gridded up my four standard bike transects into 1 km sections, surrounded by approximately 1 km square polygons. Dee's particularly interested in how the conversion of farmland to urban housing affects birds. Next Dee will be doing some clever analysis of my distance sampled bird counts to estimate the density of each bird species in each grid cell in each month over the past 12–23 years (depending on the route). She'll then compare those densities with land use changes from the NZ land cover database. It's going to be interesting to see what patterns emerge. #EcologicalMonitoring #birds #nz #ecology #LincolnUniversityNZ