19th January 2018
University of Delaware study
looks at how birds are drawn to artificial light pollution in urban areas
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
On their fall migration south in
the Northern Hemisphere, scores of birds are being lured by artificial light
pollution into urban areas that may be an ecological trap, according to the
University of Delaware's Jeff Buler.
Buler, associate professor in
UD's Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, and his research team used
16 weather surveillance radars from the northeastern United States over a
seven-year period to map the distributions of migratory birds during their fall
stopovers. The research is published in the scientific journal Ecology
Letters.
Since most of the birds that
migrate in the U.S. are nocturnal and leave their stopover sites at night,
Buler and his research group took snapshots of the birds as they departed.
"Shortly after sunset, at
around civil twilight, they all take off in these well-synchronized flights
that show up as a sudden bloom of reflectivity on the radar," Buler said.
"We take a snapshot of that, which allows us to map out where they were on
the ground and at what densities. It basically gives us a picture of their
distributions on the ground."
The researchers were interested
in seeing what factors shape the birds' distributions and why they occur in
certain areas.
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