Oleksii Dubovyk

Nest predation along an urban gradient

Ongoing

The field experiment project with artificial nests and motion-activated cameras is aimed to looking at interactions between urban environments, predators, and birds. Since nest predation is one of the leading determinants of population dynamics in birds, I hypothesise that some types of nests (e.g., cavities and nest boxes) are more effective in urban setting with an increased density of predators, therefore, nest type plays a role in environmental filtering.

More about the project

Вступ до екології угруповань: The first Ukrainian textbook on community ecology

Ongoing

When I was leaving Ukraine to start my graduate journey, I had a strong feeling that the field of ecology in Ukrainian science is very poorly developed. Learning more and more about community ecology and mathematical approaches, I realized that this knowledge may be very helpful and yet inaccessible for students interested in ecology (like I was some years ago). Therefore, I started compiling the concepts I know and am comfortable explaining in Ukrainian language, hoping that this can change somebody's learning path sometimes.

Project page

Avian diversity vs. time of day

Ongoing

It is very common to sample avian communities in the morning since it is the time of day of the highest detectability across species and therefore yields the highest estimates of taxonomic diversity. Yet, such sampling misses some quite functionally distinctive taxa (e.g., owls and goatsuckers that are active at night, raptors that depend on currents of warm air later in the day). I hypothesized that estimates of functional diversity remain constant throughout the day, and my local study with repeated point counts across Norfolk (VA) showed that indeed, functional diversity stays constant, unlike taxonomic diversity peaking in the morning. I plan to develop this topic further using automatic sound recorder units and simulations to assess biases related to covariation between species distinctiveness and detectability.

Dubovyk, O., and E.L. Walters. The influence of time-of-day on estimates of taxonomic versus functional diversity in avian communities. Bird Study 71:in print. DOI

Functional nestedness of avian communities in urban islands

This collaborative project exists thanks to the data provided by the Biodiversity Research Center in Taiwan and specialists in island biogeography at New Jersey Institute of Technology. We look at all (or, at least, most of) urban centers globally treating them as islands where avian communities possess functional traits predicted, to different extent, by either regional species pool immigrating into the islands from surrounding areas or by avian communities of other cities.

Emoji usage and tweet popularity

For a Data Science course project, I was trying to dig into Dawkinsean memetics: what if we consider emojis in tweets as memes that affect tweet popularity like genes do to individual survival? In this collaborative project I show that there is some variation in emojis usage which highly resembles species abundance curves in community ecology, and certain rules of emoji usage could indeed make a tweet more popular. I believe that there is a lot of potential in this idea when approached from an ecological/evolutionary perspective.

Colab Link

YouTube Presentation

IEEE 2023 IRI Conference paper (Aug 2023, Bellevue, WA)

Meteorologic data logger

I independently created a data logger that measures air humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure every ten seconds and writes the averaged values into a SD memory card every minute. It is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller and features DHT11 and BMP280 modules, as well as a ventilation fan. The whole project was created from scratch, including soldering scheme, MicroPython coding, and a design for 3D printing, yielding a low-cost $12 data-collection unit (SD price and powering excluded).

Agent-based model of the insurance hypothesis

The insurance hypothesis in community ecology states that rare taxa in a community provide insurance for a case of a disturbance: in such cases common species are too distressed to perform their ecological functions, but the rare taxa find them in more favorable position. Under these assumptions, one would expect that diverse communities are more capable of withstanding changes in environmental conditions. I developed an agent-based model that simulates an environment with resources and individuals of different species that gain mass and reproduce depending on environmental conditions. I also developed a convenient application to conduct the simulation.

ESA Annual Meeting 2023 Poster (Aug 8, 2023, Portland, OR)

Functional Rarity in North American Birds

Ongoing

My MS project has a working title "Spatial Distribution of Functionally Rare Landbird Species in North America". In this project, I analyze data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey and eBird covering Canada, the United States, and Mexico from 2000 to 2021, combined with data on 23 functional traits, to calculate regional rarity and functional distinctiveness of 680 breeding bird species. This will allow conservation biologists to identify locations where the ongoing extinction crisis threats the functional diversity of birds the most.

Avifauna of the Ukraine-Poland Border

I participated in the project aimed to locate the remnants of the population of the Great Snipe (Gallinago media). The project took place in meadows adjacent to the Ukrainian-Polish border which is being rarely visited by field biologists. During the weeks of fieldwork, long with looking for the Great Snipes, we were documenting the avian diversity of these areas which was before unknown.

Publications

Shydlovskyy, I., O. Dubovyk, P. Hrynyuk, I. Zahorodnyi, and V. Matejchyk. 2021. Avifauna of meadow ecosystems in borderland areas of Lviv and Volyn Oblasts. Geo&Bio 20:117-134. DOI

Lviv Point Counts Monitoring Scheme

Together with Hanna Kuzyo, we have been trying to commence a citizen-science program in Lviv city that would start a long-term collection of data on changes in populations of urban birds. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and full-scale Russian military aggression, dozens of volunteers were able to collect thousands of observations from almost 500 square kilometers since 2019, and the project is still ongoing. We also are trying to scale this program up in order to establish regional monitoring of birds compliant with the Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme.

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Migration of Birds through Borzhava Mountain Ridge

In 2019, the conservation community of Ukraine has received the alarming news that there are plans to build a massive wind farm on top of Borzhava mountain ridge, which is one of the highest regions in the Ukrainian Carpathian mountains. Yet, there were no nature protected areas that would make the project impossible, and conservationists had little data from the region. I was a part of the team that made several expeditions to the mountains and later was responsible for analysis of the data collected. The data have shown that Borzhava serves as an important corridor for bird migration, and wind turbines would result in numerous collisions, potentially killing the birds.

Publications

Dubovyk, O., A. Bokotey, L. Pokrytiuk, V. Bodnar, Y. Strus, and O. Ruchko. 2020. Autumn migration of birds over Polonyna Borzhava (Ukrainian Carpathians). Zoodiversity 54:43-52. DOI

Community Structure in Birds of Urban Parks and Forests

After my first year of data collection in urban parks I expanded the project to cover the forests adjacent to the city. It yielded a large dataset that allowed me to test various hypotheses about community assembly, as well as conservation-oriented questions. For example, I have shown that although protected areas around the cities host many unique species of birds that avoid urbanized areas, the abundance of species of conservation concern is actually higher in urban parks. This, eventually, made me to question the definition of rarity of taxa and directed my interests into the concept of functional rarity, which is more ecologically meaningful.

Publications

Dubovyk, O., H.O. Kuzyo, and A.A. Bokotey. 2020. Density variation in “rare” breeding birds in native forests and urban parks. Geo&Bio 19:20-31. DOI

Bokotey, A., N. Dziubenko, and O. Dubovyk. Representativeness and conservation of bird fauna in the Regional Landscape Park "Stilske Gorbogiria". Proceedings of the Forestry Academy of Sciences of Ukraine 20:45-56. DOI

Winter Birds Assemblages in Parks and Cemeteries

My first scientific independent project considered cemeteries and parks of Lviv. Trying to find a way to test whether avian communities inhabiting cemeteries are considerably different from the ones in urban parks has led me to the topic of similarity indices and, ultimately, to the very beginnings of statistical inference and data analysis.

Publications