PUBLIC
RELEASE: 9-JAN-2019
CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
Ithaca,
NY-- A new study combining data from citizen scientists and weather radar
stations is providing detailed insights into spring bird migration along the
Gulf of Mexico and how these journeys may be affected by climate change.
Findings on the timing, location, and intensity of these bird movements are
published in the journal Global Change Biology.
"We
looked at data from thousands of eBird observers and 11 weather radar stations
along the Gulf Coast from 1995 to 2015," says lead author Kyle Horton, an
Edward W. Rose Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "We
calculated that an average of 2.1 billion birds crosses the entire length the
Gulf Coast each spring as they head north to their breeding grounds. Until now,
we could only guess at the overall numbers from surveys done along small
portions of the shoreline."
eBird is
the Cornell Lab's worldwide online database for bird observation reports.
Sightings from bird watchers helped researchers translate their radar data into
estimates of bird numbers. Weather radar detects birds in the atmosphere in a
standardized way over time and over a large geographical area.
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