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This article was written by Cecilia Nilsson, a biologist currently based and working as a researcher at the Department of Biology at Lund University. His work focuses on using different types of radar and data science to monitor large-scale animal movements, with an emphasis on migration systems and the conservation of bird populations. She also uses these research techniques to investigate conflicts that arise when humans encroach on aerial habitats, such as wind turbine installations and bird strikes at airports.
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Biodiversity loss is one of the greatest threats facing humanity. By destroying habitats and threatening the survival of species, we tear the threads from the fabric of life that sustains us and provides us with food, oxygen and clean water. By weakening it, we also reduce nature’s resilience to long-term changes and extreme events: with less genetic variation and fewer individual organisms, ecosystems become more vulnerable to threats such as droughts, floods and diseases.
A new approach to conservation
The complexity of the web of life around us, with all its variations, fascinated me from a young age and made the choice to study biology obvious. However, during my university studies, I quickly realized that I was more attracted to the technical methods and theoretical aspects of the field of biology, and that I was moving away from the practical applications of conservation. As a doctoral student in Lund, Sweden, I used tracking radar to study the details of bird flight. Using an abandoned military tracking radar, we could track the movement of free-flying birds across the sky with very high precision, recording every wingbeat. We used these data to test evolutionary predictions of bird movements and flight. I loved learning about radar technology and delving into the details of bird flight, but I was bothered by the feeling that I was documenting something that we were slowly losing.
“I wanted to contribute, learn more and protect it.”
After completing my PhD, I stayed in academia and began working as a postdoc and then as an academic researcher, focused on using weather radar networks for biological applications. The more I learned about weather radar, the more I could see their potential as a conservation tool. Weather radars constantly monitor the sky and record everything, not only the weather, but also birds and insects. This had been known for a long time, but the complexity of extracting the huge data sets produced by weather radars had limited its use in biology.
Technological advances have opened up opportunities
About 10 years ago, the processing and storage power of computers had advanced to the point that large-scale use of weather radar data for biology began to be possible. Since then, I have worked in the small but growing academic field of analyzing weather radar data for biological purposes. Weather radars emit radio waves (usually C or S band), then listen for echoes from objects in the sky reflecting the wave back to the radar antenna.
All objects in the sky send back echoes, from tiny raindrops to large planes. Weather radars are primarily designed to detect rain droplets, which are used to map and track precipitation systems. But by focusing on the specific characteristics of the returned echo, as well as information about the movement of the object creating the echo, we can separate biological objects such as birds, insects and bats from other data. Machine Learning classification algorithms allowed us to refine this segmentation and analyze large data sets.
Weather radar data offers several benefits for biodiversity monitoring that are very difficult to obtain by other means. First of all, they monitor a habitat that we know little about and for which we have few other means of mapping: the aerial habitat. Many flying animals spend a large part of their lives in the air, making it a crucial part of their habitat. Second, weather radar data provide something very rare in the field of conservation biology: long time series of more or less standardized data. Using long time series of archived data, we can identify changes in the quantity and movement patterns of flying animals, and using networks of stations we can do this at large scales, identifying areas where populations are decreasing.
Apply new techniques to protect wildlife and their habitats
Some of the practical applications we have developed are predictive models that can show when large numbers of birds are moving during migration. This is currently used to set up various automatic warning systems in order to limit the dangers for migratory birds and for humans. For example, turning off lights on high-rise buildings to avoid bird collisions and hanging wind turbines in migration corridors to avoid bird collisions with rotor blades. Another app alert in development notifies poultry farmers when large numbers of wild birds fly over their farms, allowing them to take steps to protect their livestock from bird flu and other pathogens that birds can carry. I have also been involved in using large-scale information from weather radars to map bird movements around airports, improving knowledge of how bird migration patterns affect collision risk. birds between planes and birds.
I feel very fortunate to have been involved in the use of weather radar data as a biodiversity monitoring tool over the past decade, and I believe this technique has enormous potential for the future. I am pleased to now contribute to monitoring at least a small part of the diverse web of life, and I will continue to explore ways in which we can use this tool to assess and respond to threats to biodiversity and the world nature that surrounds us.
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