Collaborative Research: MRA: Insectivore Response to Environmental Change

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The lower atmosphere (i.e., aerosphere) is home to literally billions of organisms, including microbes, insects and birds. Species in the aerosphere often use other airborne organisms for food and are interdependent on one another. In recent decades, populations of many aerosphere organisms, such as birds and butterflies, have been rapidly declining in abundance. This project will examine the ecology of two bird and one bat species, all three of which feed on insects, and how their populations are responding in complicated ways to environmental change. These three species can also all be tracked when they emerge from their roosts by using state-of-the-art computer vision techniques with NEXRAD, the United States weather surveillance radar network. Project researchers will use the vast and ever-growing repository of data from the NEXRAD network to quantify the causes and consequences of ecological change in the aerial feeding and group habits of the two bird species (Purple Martins and Tree Swallows) and Mexican free-tailed Bats. The project will leverage environmental data from the NSF National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) together with the radar data to identify the drivers of changes in abundance, feeding, reproduction and other seasonal patterns. The massive data sets will be integrated with one another to develop predictions of how these three aerosphere species are changing at regional to continental scale, and in response to environmental changes. These studies will also incorporate training opportunities for a postdoctoral researcher and several graduate students and will include hosting an annual workshop on radar aeroecology for students and researchers (including members of underrepresented groups in science). Project investigators will work with a media team to produce a series of five video presentations on studying the ecology of birds, bats and insects in the aerosphere.This project has two objectives: (1) understand how global environmental change has impacted seasonal timing and population abundance of aerial insectivores over the past twenty-five years and (2) determine drivers of recent within and between seasonal variation in timing and abundance. Aerial insectivore populations have shown precipitous declines in the last half century — often at much steeper rates than other aerial taxa. Understanding mechanisms driving these changes would have broad implications for hundreds of species of birds, bats, and insects, and also serve as an indicator of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem health. However, the data sets needed to understand these mechanisms are currently lacking and urgently needed. While macroscale remote-sensing platforms for animals are rare, NEXRAD has emerged as a comprehensive source of information about flying animals, with large-scale and long-term (two decades) coverage. The investigators will employ an interdisciplinary approach integrating radar remote sensing, data from NEON, and computer modelling to fill this vital gap and to test questions about population change, phenology, and trophic interactions in response to anthropogenic drivers of macroscale environmental change. The PIs will focus their project on the widespread roosting behaviors of three aerial insectivore species as bellwethers for environmental change and ecosystem health: Purple Martin, Tree Swallow, and Mexican free-tailed Bat. This collaborative and interdisciplinary approach will yield large-scale, quantitative, and predictive insights into changing environments. They will also generate new workflows, methodologies, and insights for the use of NEON data for the study of global change. Through this proposal the investigators will generate the tools and web interface to automatically identify, locate, and disseminate information regarding U.S.-wide roosting phenomena. The status of aerial insectivores is a representation of the seasonal pulse of ecosystem health — the questions, infrastructural development, and outreach proposed will serve as for monitoring the status of aerial insectivores at the continental scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.