Seminar: Of Birds, Bats and Insects – Biodiversity Monitoring of the Airspace

Countless birds, bats and insects move in the airspace. Their movements link otherwise separated habitats, communities and ecosystems, raise human-wildlife conflicts and provide services (pollination, seed-dispersal, pest control) and disservices (pathogen dispersal, agricultural damage) that are relevant to human agriculture, economy and health. Biodiversity monitoring of this important yet largely overlooked habitat can only be achieved with remote-sensing technology such as radars. Over the past years, we have started using the networks of weather radars in the EU and the USA to quantify these massive biomass fluxes and understand their environmental drivers. We have also set up a network of small-scale radars that detect individual animals and their features. 

However, to tap the full potential of radars for biodiversity monitoring and produce tools for stakeholders of various societal sectors, a suite of approaches is needed to increase the taxonomic resolution of radar products, to interpolate between individual radar locations and to develop predictive models of aerial movements of birds, bats and insects. In the long run, we hope to implement a large-scale Swiss insect and aerial fauna monitoring that also provides data products to stakeholders from various societal sectors – wind energy, aviation safety, agriculture.