RoL: FELS: RAISE: Rules That Govern Seasonal Migration of Birds Through the Air

每年在北方半球，鸟类、蝙蝠和昆虫在春天向北飞，秋天向南飞。数千年来，这些空中迁徙一直吸引着人们;然而，由于难以追踪在开放天空中飞行的动物，人们对空中生活的规则知之甚少。人类活动消除了移徙者在危险旅程中休息和加油的中途停留生境，并改变了大气条件，从而对这些移徙产生了地方和全球影响。该项目探讨空中移民是否能跟上这些快速变化的步伐，以及哪些特征使一些移民比其他移民更能适应变化。由生物学家和气象学家组成的合作团队将开发和采用先进的动物跟踪方法，以揭示鸟类在迁徙飞行过程中的精确位置以及它们飞过的大气条件。这种跟踪将包括放置在鸟类和飞行器上的新型微传感器，以收集迄今为止难以捉摸的数据流，揭示鸟类在飞行中所经历的环境。研究小组将联合收割机将这些新的观测结果与来自美国各地的天气雷达数据相结合，这些数据已经捕捉到了大量关于候鸟、蝙蝠和昆虫飞越乡村的数据。这种新的和现有的数据相结合，可能会产生新的见解移民行为在不断变化的大气栖息地。通过汇集跨学科的科学家，这项研究将开发和测试不同的方法，以加强下一代学生和他们的老师之间的沟通，协作和团队合作。最后，该项目将向公众宣传不断变化的环境如何影响其社区内的移民时间。 在学校和社区中心举办的讲习班以及与当地土地所有者的合作将促进“公民科学”和适应性战略，为这一国家努力做出贡献。为了揭示控制空气中生命物候的尺度规则，本研究实施了一个研究框架，整合了时空尺度重定假说和生态学的代谢理论。在此基础上，该研究预测，空中移徙的季节性物候正在加速响应环境的变化，小身体的移民应该有更大的能力，以加快移民比大身体的移民。该项目研究北美的中心飞行路线，重点是中部平原低空急流对空中移徙模式的影响。低空急流是北美大气层的一个显著特征，许多空中移民都高度适应这种大气层。最近的证据表明，低空急流在地理范围和强度上都在扩大，这为测试研究的预测提供了理想的背景。该项目团队将利用现有的开放获取和新收集的数据，这些数据来自两个同时发生的空中迁徙系统：夜间鸟类和昆虫迁徙。用于跟踪位置和大气条件的传感器将被放置在身体大小跨越两个数量级的候鸟上。综合的生物和气象数据将被用来提高我们对低空急流的重新调整的理解，并测试关于重新调整如何影响空气中生命物候的预测。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Each year in the Northern Hemisphere, birds, bats, and insects fly north in spring and south in autumn. These aerial migrations have fascinated people for millennia; however, given the difficulty of tracking animals flying through the open skies, little is known about the rules that govern life in the air. Human activities have local and global impacts on these migrations by eliminating stopover habitats where migrants rest and refuel during their hazardous journeys and by altering atmospheric conditions. This project asks whether aerial migrants can keep pace with these rapid changes and what traits make some migrants more adaptable to change than others. The collaborative team of biologists and meteorologists will develop and employ advanced animal tracking methods to reveal both the precise locations of birds during migratory flights and the atmospheric conditions they fly through. This tracking will include novel microsensors placed on birds and aerial vehicles to collect heretofore-elusive data streams that reveal the environment experienced by birds in flight. The research team will combine these new observations with weather radar data from across the U.S. that already captures massive quantities of data on migrating birds, bats, and insects as they fly over the countryside. This combination of new and existing data may yield novel insights into migrant behavior within their changing atmospheric habitats. By bringing together scientists across disciplines, this research will develop and test different ways to enhance communication, collaboration, and teamwork among the next generation of students and their teachers. Finally, this project will communicate to the public how the changing environment influences the timing of migration over and through their communities. Workshops in schools and community centers and work with local landowners will foster "citizen science" and adaptive strategies to contribute to this national effort. To uncover scaling rules that control phenology of life in the air, this study implements a research framework that integrates the spatiotemporal rescaling hypothesis and the metabolic theory of ecology. From this basis the study predicts that seasonal phenology of aerial migration is accelerating in response to environmental changes and that small-bodied migrants should have a greater capacity to speed up migration than larger-bodied migrants. The project studies the central flyway of North America and focuses on the impact of the central plains low-level jet on aerial migration patterns. The low-level jet is a prominent feature of the North American atmosphere to which many aerial migrants are known to be highly adapted. Recent evidence that the low-level jet is both expanding in geographic scope and intensity provides an ideal context for testing the study's predictions. The project team will leverage existing open-access and newly collected data from two coincident aerial migration systems; nocturnal bird and insect migration. Sensors for tracking location and atmospheric conditions will be placed on migratory birds that span two orders of magnitude in body size. Integrated biological and meteorological data will be used to improve our understanding of the rescaling of the low-level jet and to test predictions about how that rescaling impacts the phenology of life in the air.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.