Harmonizing Community Science Datasets to Model Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) in Birds in the Subantarctic
arXiv:2512.07907
Abstract
Community science observational datasets are useful in epidemiology and ecology for modeling species distributions, but the heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardization, data quality assurance and control, and workflow management. In this paper, we present a data workflow for cleaning and harmonizing multiple community science datasets, which we implement in a case study using eBird, iNaturalist, GBIF, and other datasets to model the impact of highly pathogenic avian influenza in populations of birds in the subantarctic. We predict population sizes for several species where the demographics are not known, and we present novel estimates for potential mortality rates from HPAI for those species, based on a novel aggregated dataset of mortality rates in the subantarctic.
Proceedings of Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2025 (PRICAI 2025): Artificial Intelligence for Earth and Environmental Science 2025 (AIEES 2025) Workshop, 17-21 Nov 2025, Wellington, New Zealand. Changes from presentation paper: small spelling edits, change of preferred email, inclusion of Codeberg source code