Behavioral Responses of Captive Corvids to the Presence of Visitors

Behavioral responses of captive animals to the presence of visitors in zoos and wildlife parks can be interpreted as signs of negative (disturbance), neutral or positive (enrichment) welfare. In the present study, we investigated behavioral responses of captive common ravens, Corvus corax and crows, Corvus corone, to the presence of visitors in general and to the proximity or distance of visitors to the aviary respectively. Duration of affiliative behaviors, feeding and stress-related behaviors did not change when visitors were present compared to control situations without visitors being present. Both corvid species showed less head up behavior when visitors were in sight compared to the control condition. In contrast, preening of crows significantly increased when visitors were within two meters of the aviary compared to the control condition. The same relationship was found in regard to increase in vocalization for common ravens, but not for crows. Our results indicate that corvids, housed in a wildlife park for several years, still show behavioral responses to the presence of human visitors in close proximity to their enclosure. Overall, we did not find clear indications for reduced welfare due to visitor presence, such as increased locomotion or stress-related behaviors. We therefore conclude that the described behavioral changes are not indicative of any negative welfare impacts of visitor presence.

The general characteristics of the plowing lands birds’ population during the breeding period in Upper part of Angara region

The results of birds investigations on the most disturbed agricultural territories (plowing lands) are represented for breeding period. General indicators characterized different birds populations of plowing lands are given (density of birds populations, number of species and list of species, leaded in population of each variant of plowing lands). It is determined, that birds populations of examined lands are differ significantly. The leaders in population for many birds populations are Passer montanus (Linnaeus, 1758), Alauda arvensis (Linnaeus, 1758), Corvus corone (Linnaeus, 1758), Anthus richardi (Vieillot, 1818). The birds populations are formed for a not long period, theirs structure is defined by plowing lands sizes and degree of mosaic and the character of neighboring territories.

Multi-domain Collection Management Simplified — the Finnish National Collection Management System Kotka

Many natural history museums share a common problem: a multitude of legacy collection management systems (CMS) and the difficulty of finding a new system to replace them. Kotka is a CMS developed starting in 2011 at the Finnish Museum of Natural History (Luomus) and Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF) (Heikkinen et al. 2019, Schulman et al. 2019) to solve this problem. It has grown into a national system used by all natural history museums in Finland, and currently contains over two million specimens from several domains (zoological, botanical, paleontological, microbial, tissue sample and botanic garden collections). Kotka is a web application where data can be entered, edited, searched and exported through a browser-based user interface. It supports designing and printing specimen labels, handling collection metadata and specimen transactions, and helps support Nagoya protocol compliance. Creating a shared system for multiple institutions and collection types is difficult due to differences in their current processes, data formats, future needs and opinions. The more independent actors there are involved, the more complicated the development becomes. Successful development requires some trade-offs. Kotka has chosen features and development principles that emphasize fast development into a multitude of different purposes. Kotka was developed using agile methods with a single person (a product owner) making development decisions, based on e.g., strategic objectives, customer value and user feedback. Technical design emphasizes efficient development and usage over completeness and formal structure of the data. It applies simple and pragmatic approaches and improves collection management by providing practical tools for the users. In these regards, Kotka differs in many ways from a traditional CMS. Kotka stores data in a mostly denormalized free text format and uses a simple hierarchical data model. This allows greater flexibility and makes it easy to add new data fields and structures based on user feedback. Data harmonization and quality assurance is a continuous process, instead of doing it before entering data into the system. For example, specimen data with a taxon name can be entered into Kotka before the taxon name has been entered into the accompanying FinBIF taxonomy database. Example: simplified data about two specimens in Kotka, which have not been fully harmonized yet. Taxon: Corvus corone cornix Country: FI Collector: Doe, John Coordinates: 668, 338 Coordinate system: Finnish uniform coordinate system Taxon: Corvus corone cornix Country: FI Collector: Doe, John Coordinates: 668, 338 Coordinate system: Finnish uniform coordinate system Taxon: Corvus cornix Country: Finland Collector: Doe, J. Coordinates: 60.2442, 25,7201 Coordinate system: WGS84 Taxon: Corvus cornix Country: Finland Collector: Doe, J. Coordinates: 60.2442, 25,7201 Coordinate system: WGS84 Kotka’s data model does not follow standards, but has grown organically to reflect practical needs from the users. This is true particularly of data collected in research projects, which are often unique and complicated (e.g. complex relationships between species), requiring new data fields and/or storing data as free text. The majority of the data can be converted into simplified standard formats (e.g. Darwin Core) for sharing. The main challenge with this has been vague definitions of many data sharing formats (e.g. Darwin Core, CETAF Specimen Preview Profile (CETAF 2020), allowing different interpretations. Kotka trusts its users: it places very few limitations on what users can do, and has very simple user role management. Kotka stores the full history of all data, which allows fixing any possible errors and prevents data loss. Kotka is open source software, but is tightly coupled with the infrastructure of the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF). Currently, it is only offered as an online service (Software as a Service) hosted by FinBIF. However, it could be developed into a more modular system that could, for example, utilize multiple different database backends and taxonomy data sources.

Manufacturing intelligent Corvus corone module for a secured two way image transmission under WSN

Purpose The manufacturing of intelligent and secure visual data transmission over the wireless sensor network is key requirement nowadays to many applications. The two-way transmission of image under a wireless channel needed image must compatible along channel characteristics such as band width, energy-efficient, time consumption and security because the image adopts big space under the device of storage and need a long time that easily undergoes cipher attacks. Moreover, Quizzical the problem for the additional time under compression results that, the secondary process of the compression followed through the acquisition consumes more time. Design/methodology/approach Hence, for resolving these issues, compressive sensing (CS) has emerged, which compressed the image at the time of sensing emerges as a speedy manner that reduces the time consumption and saves bandwidth utilization but fails under secured transmission. Several kinds of research paved path to resolve the security problems under CS through providing security such as the secondary process. Findings Thus, concerning the above issues, this paper proposed the Corvus corone module two-way image transmission that provides energy efficiency along CS model, secured transmission through a matrix of security under CS such as inbuilt method, which was named as compressed secured matrix and faultless reconstruction along that of eminent random matrix counting under CS. Originality/value Experimental outputs shows intelligent module gives energy efficient, secured transmission along lower computational timing also decreased bit error rate.

Observation of female-male mounting in the carrion crow

We report an observation of a female carrion crow, Corvus corone corone, mounting her long-term, pair-bonded, male partner. The report highlights the importance of more systematic quantitative studies of rare socio-sexual behaviours, which could provide important insights into the evolution of non-conceptive socio-sexual behaviours.