Bird strikes at commercial airports explained by citizen science and weather radar data

1. Aircraft collisions with birds span the entire history of human aviation, including fatal collisions during some of the first powered human flights. Much effort has been expended to reduce such collisions, but increased knowledge about bird movements and species occurrence could dramatically improve decision support and proactive measures to reduce them. Migratory movements of birds pose a unique, often overlooked, threat to aviation that is particularly difficult for individual airports to monitor and predict: the occurrence of birds vary extensively in space and time at the local scales of airport responses.

2. We use two publicly available datasets, radar data from the US NEXRAD network characterizing migration movements and eBird data collected by citizen scientists to map bird movements and species composition with low human effort expenditures but high temporal and spatial resolution relative to other large scale bird survey methods. As a test case we compare these results f...