“I can’t wait to see the effect the BirdCast Migration Dashboard will have when people are able to see detailed migration information for their own county,” said Ian Owens, executive director of the Cornell Lab. What are the best nights for turning off lights to prevent attracting birds and risking building collisions? Where is the best location to build wind turbines to avoid killing birds? The information can be used by a wide range of people, from conservationists and biologists, to birdwatchers and nature lovers. Knowing the who, where, and when of migration can lead directly to action. The Dashboard also offers a list of species expected to be passing through at the current time and place based on eBird checklists. This is our best tool right now to try to understand migration.” “Massive quantities of living creatures are flying through the night sky. “One of the most compelling things about the new Dashboard is that it’s focusing on a phenomenon that is largely taking place out of sight and most likely when we’re asleep,” said Audrey Carlsen who led the design and development of the Dashboard for the Cornell Lab.
The dashboard shows nocturnally migrating species most likely to arrive or depart a selected region at this time of year on a weekly basis, based on frequency of observations from eBird. We don’t come close to knowing all the patterns that you will be able to explore when you look at this tool. There is tremendous potential for learning, here. We want to elevate people’s abilities to understand bird migration, to talk about migration. That’s been fascinating, but now you can also get a feel for what’s going on in your own neck of the woods. “In recent years, we’ve been able to visualize and forecast the movements of migrating birds on a continent-wide scale, using weather surveillance radar. “With this new Migration Dashboard, you get facts and figures about what’s going on in the skies above you at the county level in near-real time,” said Andrew Farnsworth, senior researcher with BirdCast. The Dashboard reveals bird migration for the contiguous United States in localized detail previously unavailable to the general public. The BirdCast program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is exploring these unseen movements with its new Migration Dashboard.
Billions of birds make their incredible journeys under cover of darkness. Bird migration is one of the greatest mostly-unseen spectacles of nature.
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