A bay-breasted warbler, which weighs about four pennies, travels remarkable distances twice a year. Between its wintering homes in northern South America and Canada’s spruce forests, the little songbird travels over 4,000 miles (6,437 kilometres).
Jill Deppe, senior director of the migratory bird initiative at the National Audubon Society, described migratory birds as these tiny globetrotters.
In order to depict the migration paths of roughly 450 different bird species in the Americas, including warblers, a new online atlas of bird migration, which was published on Thursday, pulls from an unparalleled amount of scientific and community data sources.
The Bird Migration Explorer mapping tool, available free to the public, is an ongoing collaboration between 11 groups that collect and analyze data on bird movements, including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, the U.S. Geological Survey, Georgetown University, Colorado State University, and the National Audubon Society.
The website will for the first time compile online data from hundreds of scientific studies that track the movements of birds using GPS tags, as well as more than a century’s worth of USGS bird banding data, community science observations entered into Cornell’s eBird platform, genomic analysis of feathers to determine the origins of birds, and other data.
According to Peter Marra, a bird migration specialist at Georgetown University who worked on the research, ‘the past twenty years have seen a tremendous renaissance in diverse technologies to follow bird migrations around the world at scales that haven’t been conceivable before.’
On the website, users can enter a species, like osprey, and track its movements over a full year. For example, data from 378 tracked ospreys show up as yellow dots that move between coastal North America and South America as a calendar bar scrolls through the months of the year.
Post Your Comments