Innovative Visualizations Shed Light on Avian Nocturnal Migration

PLoS One. 2016 Aug 24;11(8):e0160106. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160106. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Globally, billions of flying animals undergo seasonal migrations, many of which occur at night. The temporal and spatial scales at which migrations occur and our inability to directly observe these nocturnal movements makes monitoring and characterizing this critical period in migratory animals' life cycles difficult. Remote sensing, therefore, has played an important role in our understanding of large-scale nocturnal bird migrations. Weather surveillance radar networks in Europe and North America have great potential for long-term low-cost monitoring of bird migration at scales that have previously been impossible to achieve. Such long-term monitoring, however, poses a number of challenges for the ornithological and ecological communities: how does one take advantage of this vast data resource, integrate information across multiple sensors and large spatial and temporal scales, and visually represent the data for interpretation and dissemination, considering the dynamic nature of migration? We assembled an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, meteorologists, computer scientists, and graphic designers to develop two different flow visualizations, which are interactive and open source, in order to create novel representations of broad-front nocturnal bird migration to address a primary impediment to long-term, large-scale nocturnal migration monitoring. We have applied these visualization techniques to mass bird migration events recorded by two different weather surveillance radar networks covering regions in Europe and North America. These applications show the flexibility and portability of such an approach. The visualizations provide an intuitive representation of the scale and dynamics of these complex systems, are easily accessible for a broad interest group, and are biologically insightful. Additionally, they facilitate fundamental ecological research, conservation, mitigation of human-wildlife conflicts, improvement of meteorological products, and public outreach, education, and engagement.

MeSH terms

  • Animal Migration*
  • Animals
  • Birds*
  • Darkness*
  • Europe
  • Flight, Animal*
  • Radar*
  • United States
  • Web Browser

Grants and funding

National Science Foundation Award IIS-1125098 supported research in the US. Additional funding for US research came from Leon Levy Foundation (leonlevyfoundation.org). The funders provided support in the form of salaries for authors AF, SK, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Costs for travel, accommodation and local organization of workshops and short research visits were funded in part by COST – European Cooperation in Science and Technology through the Action ES1305 ‘European Network for the Radar Surveillance of Animal Movement’ (ENRAM). The commercial entities iMinds and Wildly Mild funded the salaries of WVdB and JKVDM, respectively, during part of this study; however, these organizations did not play a role in study design, data collection, analysis, publication decision, of manuscript preparation. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.