Discovering relationships between climate and animal migration with new tools for linking animal movement tracks with weather and land surface data

Gil Bohrer, The Ohio State University, bohrer.17@osu.edu (Presenter)
Roland Kays, New York State Museum, rkays@mail.nysed.gov
Martin Wikelski, Max Plank Institute of Ornithology, martin@orn.mpg.de
David Brandes, Lafayette College, brandesd@lafayette.edu
Jiawei Han, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hanj@cs.uiuc.edu
Steven Garrity, Los-Allamos National Laboratory, sgarrity@lanl.gov
David Douglas, USGS, ddouglas@usgs.gov

We will present the development of a widely needed on-line portal that will streamline the co-registration and analysis of animal tracking data with a variety of weather and land surface data. This on-line resource will help discover unique information about weather and land-surface dependencies and vulnerability of migrating birds and other threatened and endangered species. These kinds of information are crucial for planning and management of areas allocated as refuges and for forecasting the population status and habitats needs in future conditions of climate and land use changes. Wildlife biologists from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US National Park Service, the USGS, the Smithsonian National Migratory Bird Center, and the Acopian Center for Conservation have partnered with us to contribute to the system development and contribute bird migration tracks data from GPS tags.

The project is based on extending the capabilities of Movebank (www.Movebank.org). Movebank provides a secure on-line archive to store, process, and share animal movement data. The tools we propose will allow all Movebank users to directly integrate their movement data with remote sensing and weather-reanalysis datasets. This will allow easy, automated access to data about the environmental conditions along migration routes, which influence the physiological condition and the survival of individuals during the migration event.

Data will be obtained from satellite observation products, such as the MODIS ecological, ocean, land and atmospheric level-3 products, as well as from high resolution DEM, Landsat, TRMM, NCEP-NCAR reanalysis models. Derived data variables will be calculated and added to this combined environmental data resource. We will present a test case in which derived variables that indicate the strength up wind uplift sources were calculated using data from DEM and the North American Reanalysis. We used this data to analyze the track preferences of two raptor species and detected contrasting preferences to orographic uplift vs. thermal uplift between the two species.

Presentation Type:  Plenary Talk

Session:  Poster Speed Talks:

Presentation Time:  Wed 9:30 AM  (5 minutes)