EAGER: Advancing Biological Interpretations of Radar Data

地球的季节性在热带和温带之间产生了能量、信息和生物多样性的流动。这种流动大部分发生在大气层中，是一种种类繁多的迁徙动物。远距离迁徙和扩散是生产力迅速季节性重新分布、疾病传播以及生物多样性跨洲和跨洲转移的重要因素。可视化和模型化利用大气层觅食、扩散和迁徙的各种动物的集体行为是理解和预测大陆宏观生态动态的关键；这将是该项目的核心重点。这一急切的奖项将侧重于一种高风险的方法，以NEXRAD天气监测雷达网络为基础，建立对大气层宏观生态动力学的机械性理解。雷达技术、计算能力和数据处理工作流程--主要是气象学--最近和正在取得的进展相结合，将研究人员带入了将天气雷达用作生物传感器系统的能力革命的边缘。然而，在气象学之外，由于普遍缺乏为生物学家量身定做的分析工具和数据集，这种资源被极大地利用不足。这个急切的奖项将专注于改善基础设施和验证，以提供大气层中动物的分布、密度和多样性的基于雷达的测量。该项目将包括一系列综合的观测、实验和建模研究，将产生一套工具、产品和应用程序，使空气生态学中的变革科学成为可能。该奖项的更广泛影响将增加雷达数据在环境生物学研究中的可用性和可解释性，并在生态学、空间建模、计算机科学和气象学的界面上建立一个跨学科的培训环境。开发的雷达工具和产品将被广泛分发，并对基本了解空气生态学做出重大贡献，这将有助于(1)将风力发电开发的影响降至最低；(2)航空安全；(3)评估生态系统服务。该项目将通过与来自不同学科(即生物学、计算机科学和气象学)的联合顾问和委员会成员一起支持一个跨学科小组项目中的博士后和学生，来引领一种日益增长的跨学科研究文化。

Earth's seasonality produces a flow of energy, information, and biodiversity between tropical and temperate regions. Much of this flow occurs through the aerosphere is a broad diversity of migratory animals. Long distance migration and dispersal is an important contributor to the rapid seasonal redistribution of productivity, spread of disease, and shifts in biodiversity across and among continents. Visualizing and modeling the collective behaviors of the diversity of animals that use the aerosphere for foraging, dispersal, and migration is pivotal to understanding and forecasting continental macroecological dynamics; and will be a core focus of this project. This EAGER award will focus on a high-risk approach building a mechanistic understanding of macroecological dynamics in the aerosphere based on the NEXRAD network of weather surveillance radars. The combination of recent and ongoing advances in radar technology, computation capabilities and data processing workflows, primarily in meteorology, have brought researchers to the edge of a revolution in the capacity to use weather radars as a biological sensors system. However, outside of meteorology, this resource is vastly under-used due to a general lack of analysis tools and data sets tailored to biologists. This EAGER award will focus on improved infrastructure and validation on providing radar-based metrics of distribution, density, and diversity of animals in the aerosphere. This project will include an integrated series of observational, experimental, and modeling studies that will result in a set of tools, products, and applications that enable transformative science in aeroecology.The broader impacts of this award will increase the availability and interpretability of radar data for investigations in environmental biology and building an interdisciplinary training environment at the interface of ecology, spatial modeling, computer science and meteorology. The radar tools and products that are developed will be widely distributed and make major contributions to basic understanding of aeroecology, which will be useful in (1) minimizing the impact of wind power development; (2) aviation safety; and (3) evaluation of ecosystem services. This project will lead a growing culture of interdisciplinary research by supporting a post-doc and student in an interdisciplinary group project with co-advisors and committee members from different disciplines (i.e. biology, computer science, and meteorology).