Location and land cover uncertainty associated with stop-level data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS)

The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) (https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/) has counted birds annually for over fifty-five years. Survey 'routes' each consist of 50 'stops' (point counts) placed along a route path. Inter-stop distances and stop locations can vary from route to route and from year to year, and precise locations of each stop are not typically recorded. This data set (and the associated R script) includes quantified uncertainty in BBS annual point count locations using digitized estimates of stop locations from the central United States. It also includes the necessary components to calculate the resulting land cover uncertainty for each annual point count (i.e., stop) and facilitates incorporation of this uncertainty into Bayesian multi-species hierarchical models to predict stop-level BBS bird detections. It can be used to repeat the authors' analyses, or to produce additional analyses of BBS data from other regions, for other bird species, or for other covariates. Files in this dataset include (1) spatial coordinates of autogenerated points placed every 40 m along BBS routes in the central United States ('Autogenerated_BBS_points.csv'), (2) the autogenerated point number nearest each digitized estimate of BBS route-stop-year combination (although the year is typically unknown; 'BBS_stops_nearest_autogen_point.csv'), (3) location uncertainty along BBS route paths of BBS stops by stop number, in terms both of autogenerated point numbers and route path distance ('BBS_stop_location_uncertainty.csv'), (4) locations and nearest autogenerated point numbers for some BBS stop locations that were recorded using GPS in known years ('WI_GPS_BBS_stops.csv'), and (5) a series of land cover habitat summary files (one for each relevant year) for BBS routes in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan that summarizes land cover within a 400 m radius of each autogenerated point on these routes (e.g., 'habSubset_nlcd_2004.csv'). Land cover classes are based on merged cover classes from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). This data set can best be understood in the context of the associated R code (https://doi.org/10.5066/P1HY6LDF) and manuscript.