Open Access Publications
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Open access publications by faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology.
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Browsing Open Access Publications by Subject "animal migration"
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Item Artificial light at night is a top predictor of bird migration stopover density(Nature Communications, 2023-12-04) Horton, Kyle G.; Buler, Jeffrey J.; Anderson, Sharolyn J.; Burt, Carolyn S.; Collins, Amy C.; Dokter, Adriaan M.; Guo, Fengyi; Sheldon, Daniel; Tomaszewska, Monika Anna; Henebry, Geoffrey M.As billions of nocturnal avian migrants traverse North America, twice a year they must contend with landscape changes driven by natural and anthropogenic forces, including the rapid growth of the artificial glow of the night sky. While airspaces facilitate migrant passage, terrestrial landscapes serve as essential areas to restore energy reserves and often act as refugia—making it critical to holistically identify stopover locations and understand drivers of use. Here, we leverage over 10 million remote sensing observations to develop seasonal contiguous United States layers of bird migrant stopover density. In over 70% of our models, we identify skyglow as a highly influential and consistently positive predictor of bird migration stopover density across the United States. This finding points to the potential of an expanding threat to avian migrants: peri-urban illuminated areas may act as ecological traps at macroscales that increase the mortality of birds during migration.Item Using weather radar to help minimize wind energy impacts on nocturnally migrating birds(Conservation Letters, 2022-05-02) Cohen, Emily B.; Buler, Jeffrey J.; Horton, Kyle G.; Lodd, Scott R.; Cabrera-Cruz, Sergio A.; Smolinsky, Jaclyn A.; Marra, Peter P.As wind energy rapidly expands worldwide, information to minimize impacts of this development on biodiversity is urgently needed. Here we demonstrate how data collected by weather radar networks can inform placement and operation of wind facilities to reduce collisions and minimize habitat-related impacts on nocturnally migrating birds. We found over a third of nocturnal migrants flew through altitudes within the rotor-swept zone surrounding the North American Great Lakes, a continentally important migration corridor. Migrating birds concentrated in terrestrial stopover habitats within 20-km from shorelines, a distance well beyond the current guidelines for construction of new land-based facilities, and their distributions varied seasonally and at local and regional scales, creating predictable opportunities to minimize impacts from wind energy development and operation. Networked radar data are available across the United States and other countries and broad application of this approach could provide information critical to bird-friendly expansion of this globally important energy source.