The conference takes place at the University of Delaware – FinTech Innovation Hub located at 591 Collaboration Way, Newark, Delaware, USA 19713 (view map). All sessions will occur in Conference Room 501. Poster reception will be held in the Grain Exchange Restaurant on the first flor of the FinTech Innovation Hub.
Times are indicated in local times for Newark, Delaware (EDT, UTC-05:00). See the current time in Newark.
Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the following organizations:
Keynote Speakers
Sidney Gauthreaux, Jr: Sid began exploring the use of weather surveillance radar (WSR-57) to detect, quantify, and monitor migrating birds in the atmosphere at the National Weather Service installation in New Orleans while a college freshman in 1959. His graduate research focused on the use of the WSR-57 to study the arrival of spring trans-Gulf bird migration in southwestern and southeastern Louisiana for his M.S. (August 1965) and PhD. (August 1968) degrees. He continued his radar research at the WSR-57 station in Athens, GA while on a post-doctorate fellowship at the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia (1968-1970), and in August 1970 joined the faculty at Clemson University where he continued to work with the WSR-57 in Slidell, LA until he began research with the new Doppler WSR-88D south of Houston at Dickinson, TX in the spring of 1992. His research with this radar has continued beyond retirement from Clemson in May 2006 and the end of a Visiting Professorship at the University of Illinois in September 2019. During his career, Sid also worked with a surveillance marine radar with a parabolic antenna (Birdrad), a phase-array bird track radar (BSTAR), and a fixed-vertical beam marine radar aligned with a thermal imaging camera (VertRad+TI).
Maja Bradarić: Maja is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, where, by using tracking radars, she tries to understand how the environment shapes spatiotemporal patterns of bird movements during migration over the North Sea to better comprehend their ecology and behaviour in a rapidly changing world. She is passionate about conservation and improving collaboration between scientists, governments, companies and NGOs to create actions to address the challenges the natural world is presented with.
Yuting Deng: Yuting (Hermione) is a PhD candidate in the Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology program at Colorado State University. She studies the impact of climate change on several aerial insectivore species (swallows and bats) that form large community roosts. By combining AI-annotated weather surveillance radar (NEXRAD) data and climatic variables, she aims to understand the drivers of phenology changes throughout aerial insectivores’ life history.
Fengyi Guo: Fengyi (Freda) is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. She studies the stopover ecology and conservation of migratory landbirds in North America. Combining data-intensive radar remote sensing and on-the-ground field surveys, her research focuses on identifying stopover hotspots and key habitats for migratory landbirds during the en-route period, thus contributing to the full annual cycle conservation of migratory landbirds. In September 2024, she will join the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as an Atkinson and Rose Postdoctoral Fellow.
Birgen Haest: Birgen is a computational ecologist studying animal migration. As a research associate at the Swiss Ornithological Institute, he uses radar to quantify the migratory movements of insects, bats, and birds, and understand the drivers thereof.
Elske Tielens: Elske is a quantitative ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Georgia. Her work leverages weather surveillance radar (WSR) for widespread insect monitoring, to understand how anthropogenic change affects insect movement, abundance, and species interactions. She is interested in integrating diverse data sources, understanding ecological patterns across scales, and finding ways to make WSR useful to the broader community. In fall 2024 she will continue her work in aeroecology as a postdoc with the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research.
Accelerator Award Recipient
Adriaan Dokter: Adriaan leads the Aeroecology and BirdCast programs at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. His research bridges the disciplines of movement ecology, population ecology and computer science, addressing questions on the effects of global change on the distribution and population sizes of migratory birds. Adriaan is also the maintainer and lead developer of the R-package bioRad for biological analysis of weather radar data.
Schedule of events
Day 1: Thursday, August 8
7:00-8:15
Early morning bird walk at UD Farm (meet in front of the UD Creamery: map)
8:30-9:00
Registration – Lobby of Room 501 FinTech Innovation Hub
Presentation of “Lifetime Achievement Award” to Sidney Gauthreaux (Andrew Farnsworth)
9:30-10:15
Sidney Gauthreaux, Jr – The use of weather surveillance radar (WSR) to study the movements of birds in the atmosphere: A personal viewpoint Lifetime achievement keynote
Maja Bradarić – Radar-informed aeroconservation: practices, challenges and possibilities Early career keynote
9:45-10:00
Shannon Curley – Differences in terrestrial versus offshore songbird migration: Implications for offshore wind energy development and operations
10:00-10:15
Bart Hoekstra – Radar-based mapping of migratory birds for nature-inclusive wind energy
10:15-10:45
Coffee break
Session 6: Ornithology At The Ground (moderator: Jeff Buler)
10:45-11:15
Fengyi Guo – Stopover ecology and conservation of migratory landbirds in the eastern United States Early career keynote
11:15-11:30
T. J. Zenzal – Hurricane impacts to landbirds during autumn migration along the northwestern Gulf of Mexico
11:30 – 11:45
Amanda Crandall – Factors influencing spatial patterns in migratory landbird stopover across Texas and Louisiana, USA
11:45 – 12:00
Matt Hardy – Examining waterfowl distributions with NEXRAD for nationwide conservation and food security
Lunch 12:00 – 13:45 (provided)
Session 7: Methodological Advancements I (moderator: Baptiste Schmid)
13:45-14:15
Birgen Haest – Characterizing migratory insect movements across the Western Palearctic Mid career keynote
14:15-14:30
Dominik Kleger – The next generation of aerial biodiversity monitoring
14:30-14:45
Nadja Weisshaupt – Evaluating the potential of nocturnal flight calls in bird migration research by citizen science and weather radar observations (remote)
14:45 – 15:00
Samuel Hodges – Niche model applications in radar aeroecology
15:00 – 15:30
Coffee break
Session 8: Methodological Advancements II (moderator: Cecilia Nilsson)
15:30-15:45
Cecilia Nilsson– The Aloft data repository for vertical bird profiles of European weather radar data
15:45-16:00
Mikko Jimenez – Quantifying range- and topographical biases in weather surveillance radar measures of migratory bird activity
16:00-16:15
Mubin Ul Haque – Improving ecology approaches for detecting flying animals from weather radar with machine learning (remote)
16:15 – 16:30
Jens van Erp – A post-processing framework for bird radar systems
