New Approaches for Understanding and Conserving Bird Migration --- Radar Ornithology in the Era of Big Data

Andrew Farnsworth, PhD

Tue, Mar 08, 2022 7:00 PM

BirdCast is a collaborative project that leverages expertise of computer scientists and ornithologists to harness the power of big data to study movements of birds. Dr. Farnsworth will be speaking about monitoring bird migration with data collected by citizen scientists and the US weather surveillance radar network to forecast where, when, and how many birds will migrate and to observe these movements in near real-time at a continental scale.

Dr. Farnsworth will discuss magnitudes and extents of migration, challenges of monitoring birds’ nocturnal movements at scales relevant to their biology, and ways we use radar to remotely sense interconnected patterns in time and space.

Birds truly represent dynamic and global communities, and recent trends in methods and analyses showcase what may be the future of bird migration research and conservation to study birds’ complex roles in terrestrial, aerial, and aquatic systems. In the age of big data and observation, the potential of what remains for us to learn is inspiring.

Dr. Farnsworth will highlight applications of radar and the data we have collected to develop models to forecast bird migration as well as to predict bird-aircraft collisions, to study impacts of light pollution on nocturnally migrating bird, to investigate phenological changes in migration systems over decades at continental scales, to estimate bird mortality and recruitment, and even to study other animal movements in the atmosphere.

Please join Andy for a fascinating discussion.

Here is a video of the talk: