Spring Migration Strategies of Three Waterfowl Species Wintering in Southern New England

Data and code from a Journal of Avian Biology manuscript by Tori Mezebish Quinn, last updated May 2026. The dataset contains GPS telemetry data used to analyze spring migration strategies of American black ducks, Atlantic brant, and greater scaup. It quantifies interspecific, interindividual, and annual variation in metrics like migration initiation date, duration, and stopover behavior.

Use Cases

• Comparing time-minimizing vs. energy-minimizing migration strategies based on metrics like stopover-to-travel ratio.
• Quantifying intraspecific variation in migration behavior using coefficients of variation for metrics like migration duration.
• Analyzing annual variation in spring migration patterns using normalized differences for species like American black ducks.
• Investigating the importance of key stopover sites for long-distance migrating species based on stopover duration and frequency metrics.

Strengths

• Includes GPS telemetry data for 49 individual birds across three waterfowl species.
• Quantifies seven specific migration metrics, including ordinal dates, duration, and stopover behavior.
• Accompanied by analysis code (SpringMigStrategyCode.R) for reproducibility of statistical tests like ANOVA and TukeyHSD.

Limitations

• Row count and dataset size (0.0 B) are unknown, limiting suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the specific wintering area in southern New England, USA.

Provenance

Source

Tori Mezebish Quinn, via figshare.

Collection Method

GPS telemetry data collection from tagged birds.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-22 06:35:51.

Geography

Southern New England, USA (wintering area); breeding areas varied by species.