Radar aeroecology – a missing piece of the puzzle for studying the migration ecology of animals

Abstract

In a recent Ecography article, Bauer et al. (2019) identified the most pressing questions for advancing our understanding of how anthropogenic changes in the environment affect aerial migrants at the macroscale and how these changes consequently influence humans. To surmount the associated challenges, large-scale networks of weather surveillance radar are the suggested solution because addition to measuring precipitation and wind, they also continuously monitor the aggregated biomass movements of insects, birds and bats over large spatial and temporal scales. As such, they provide essential and unprecedented fundamental information about macroecological patterns (e.g. migration routes, phenologies and navigation strategies) for migratory species. In addition to the simultaneous description of such patterns for all such species at the continental level, long-term changes in these can be revealed by taking into account existing historical radar data. The combination of these three properties, i.e. cross-species, continental and long-term, is unique and provides the much-needed information regarding migration ecology that the individual-based approaches cannot provide via tracking, manipulative and genetic studies of single species. Thus, radar aeroecology constitutes a missing piece of the puzzle to answer the grand challenges of migration ecology.