Aeroecology' uses radar to track flying animals

The study of birds, bats and flying insects could be transformed by the use of technology designed for tracking storms, researchers say.

Meteorologists once treated the signals from flying animals as a nuisance that complicated their measurements.

But recent improvements in computing power and networking of radar stations have turned that nuisance signal into a valuable data source on animal ecology.

A panel told the AAAS conference that radar could spot a single bee at 50km.

Further improvements to the technique must be made before that level of resolution can be reached, however; now it is the storms that are complicating the signals that interest biologists.

But pioneer of the "aeroecology" field, Thomas Kunz, of Boston University, told the conference why radar is needed.

"One of the limitations we have in working with small animals like birds and bats and insects is that you can't put large satellite radio transmitters on them to understand their movements.
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I paused and said, 'you can estimate the number of raindrops in a raincloud? Do you think we could estimate the number of bats in a bat cloud?'”

End Quote Winifred Frick Bioinformatics expert, University of California, Santa Cruz

"So the whole concept of aeroecology is an integrated approach using many different tools to try to answer the questions about how organisms move and use the aerosphere."

Phillip Chilson is a meteorologist from the University of Oklahoma, who has been working with radar for two decades. He explained why radar is a potentially transformative tool for aeroecology.

"We already have well-developed networks of radar around the country and around the world - used for tracking weather and for tracking airplanes.

"There are as many as 510 government-owned and maintained radar (installations) in the US and 156 for weather radar; Europe has in the order of 200. We have a wonderful tool that we can use for exploring biology without much outlay of money from scientific sources."

Dr Chilson and Professor Kunz recently teamed up with biologist Winifred Frick of the University of California, Santa Cruz to look into the mystery of bat movements.

"Dr Kunz and I were meeting Dr Chilson about a year ago over breakfast and they kept talking about the 'QPE', and finally I asked what it is," Dr Frick told the meeting.

It stands for quantitative precipitation estimator - a numerical method to measure how much rain there is in a storm front.