I would like to investigate a possible relationship between the daily activity patterns of an animal and the timing and amount of daylight experiences by the animal. I do not have light-logger data per animal, so I am searching for a free data source. Ideally this data would be location specific (I'm working near Albany, New York, USA) and available per minute. Can any one suggest a data source? Perhaps something widely accepted within the circadian biology community?
Something like this?
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/pubs/redbook/PDFs/NY.PDF
In a weather station. They register every data per minute. And you can find one 20 km (as maximum) from your place of interest.
Good luck
Not sure if this is what level of illumination you need, but I use these a lot: http://www.gaisma.com/en/ or http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php. I also find that the local metoffice tends to be very helpful and can often provide actual measurements (if you're nice to them). good luck with your research! Best, Gabi
Ask also Prof. Michel Terman in New York at Columbia. He has a software, which can simulate any solar illuminance pattern for each location on our planet.
Hi Scott, we wrote a Phyton script to calculate any twilight times for any place of the world. Input parameters are the date, longitude, latitude and the angle of the sun (0 is sunset/sunrise, 6 degree is civil twilight a.s.o.). Phyton is free ware. If you are interested or should it be what you mean, contact me.
Best, Anne
Thank you all for your input. I think at this point I will explore the start and ends of sunrise/set and twilight in relation to the start/end of my animals activity. Many thanks for your responses!
Hi Scott, we wrote also for this task a Phyton script. Input: longitude, latitude, sun rise angle, date (to calculate the twilight time) and the activity data from the collar (txt-format). Before you have to define at what threshold a really "activity" starts (minimal duration of an activity burst AND minimal level of the activity data). Output: for each activity burst of a day you get the timely distance between the start of the burst and the dawn or dusk. Since now, we worked only with activity data of Vectronic collars but we want change (also our analytical tools) to e-obs-data in order to distinguish between different behaviours. So, maybe we can cooperate...
Best
Anne
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