Date/Time
Date(s) - 08/12/2021
10 h 00 min
Categories
Bird Strike Canada Seminar 2—1: Bird strikes at commercial airports explained by citizen science and weather radar data
Increased knowledge about bird movements and species occurrence could dramatically improve decision support and proactive measures to reduce aircraft collisions with birds. Migratory movements of birds pose a unique, often overlooked, threat to aviation that is particularly difficult for individual airports to monitor and predict: the occurrence of birds vary extensively in space and time at the local scales of airport responses.
We used two publicly available datasets, radar data from the US NEXRAD network characterizing migration movements and eBird data collected by citizen scientists to map bird movements and species composition with low human effort expenditures but high temporal and spatial resolution relative to other large scale bird survey methods.
By better understanding when and where different bird species occur, airports across the world can predict seasonal periods of collision risks with greater temporal and spatial resolution; such predictions include potential to predict when the most severe and damaging strikes may occur.
Dr. Cecilia Nilsson is a behavioural ecologist working with the flight behavior of birds, bird migration, and radar aeroecology. She is currently situated at the University of Copenhagen, where she studies large scale patterns of bird flight behaviour using data from networks of weather surveillance radars.
Her current work includes large scale differences between migration systems, bird movements in extreme conditions, and what happens when birds and humans share aerial habitat.
All sessions will be presented on Zoom. Seminar time is given in Pacific Time. Please adjust for your time zone. Note that Pacific Time is 7:00 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time.