EAGER: Advancing Biological Interpretations of Radar Data

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

Earth's seasonality produces a flow of energy, information, and biodiversity between tropical and temperate regions. Much of this flow occurs through the aerosphere is a broad diversity of migratory animals. Long distance migration and dispersal is an important contributor to the rapid seasonal redistribution of productivity, spread of disease, and shifts in biodiversity across and among continents. Visualizing and modeling the collective behaviors of the diversity of animals that use the aerosphere for foraging, dispersal, and migration is pivotal to understanding and forecasting continental macroecological dynamics; and will be a core focus of this project. This EAGER award will focus on a high-risk approach building a mechanistic understanding of macroecological dynamics in the aerosphere based on the NEXRAD network of weather surveillance radars. The combination of recent and ongoing advances in radar technology, computation capabilities and data processing workflows, primarily in meteorology, have brought researchers to the edge of a revolution in the capacity to use weather radars as a biological sensors system. However, outside of meteorology, this resource is vastly under-used due to a general lack of analysis tools and data sets tailored to biologists. This EAGER award will focus on improved infrastructure and validation on providing radar-based metrics of distribution, density, and diversity of animals in the aerosphere. This project will include an integrated series of observational, experimental, and modeling studies that will result in a set of tools, products, and applications that enable transformative science in aeroecology. The broader impacts of this award will increase the availability and interpretability of radar data for investigations in environmental biology and building an interdisciplinary training environment at the interface of ecology, spatial modeling, computer science and meteorology. The radar tools and products that are developed will be widely distributed and make major contributions to basic understanding of aeroecology, which will be useful in (1) minimizing the impact of wind power development; (2) aviation safety; and (3) evaluation of ecosystem services. This project will lead a growing culture of interdisciplinary research by supporting a post-doc and student in an interdisciplinary group project with co-advisors and committee members from different disciplines (i.e. biology, computer science, and meteorology).