EAGER: Advancing Biological Interpretations of Radar Data

地球的季节性在热带和温带地区之间产生了能量、信息和生物多样性的流动。这种流动大部分是通过大气圈发生的，是各种各样的迁徙动物。长距离迁徙和扩散是生产力季节性快速再分配、疾病传播和生物多样性跨洲和跨洲变化的重要因素。利用大气进行觅食、扩散和迁徙的动物多样性的集体行为的可视化和建模对于理解和预测大陆宏观生态动力学至关重要；这将是这个项目的核心焦点。这项EAGER奖励将侧重于一种高风险方法，在NEXRAD天气监测雷达网络的基础上，建立对大气圈宏观生态动力学的机制理解。最近和正在进行的雷达技术、计算能力和数据处理工作流程的结合，主要是在气象学方面，使研究人员在使用气象雷达作为生物传感器系统的能力方面处于革命的边缘。然而，在气象学之外，由于普遍缺乏为生物学家量身定制的分析工具和数据集，这种资源被大大低估了。该EAGER项目将重点改进基础设施，并验证基于雷达的大气圈动物分布、密度和多样性指标。该项目将包括一系列综合的观测、实验和建模研究，这些研究将产生一套工具、产品和应用，使航空生态学的科学变革成为可能。该合同的广泛影响将增加雷达数据的可用性和可解释性，用于环境生物学调查，并在生态学、空间建模、计算机科学和气象学的界面上建立跨学科的培训环境。所开发的雷达工具和产品将广泛分布，并对空气生态学的基本认识作出重大贡献，这将有助于(1)尽量减少风力发电开发的影响；（二）航空安全；(3)生态系统服务功能评价。该项目将通过支持博士后和学生与来自不同学科（如生物学、计算机科学和气象学）的共同顾问和委员会成员进行跨学科小组项目，引领跨学科研究文化的发展。

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).