Heavy migration traffic and bad weather are a dangerous combination: Bird collisions in New York City

Bird-building collisions account for 365-988 million bird fatalities every year in the United States alone. Understanding conditions that heighten collision risk is critical to developing effective strategies for reducing this source of anthropogenic bird mortality. Meteorological factors and regional migration traffic may influence collision rates but also may be difficult to disentangle from other effects. We used 5 years of bird collision counts in New York City to examine the influence of nocturnal weather conditions and bird migration traffic rates on collisions with buildings during spring and fall. We found that seasonally unfavorable winds and conditions that impede visibility are important factors that influence rates of bird-building collisions during both seasons. Specifically, northerly and westerly winds and low visibility in the spring, and southerly and westerly winds and low cloud ceiling height in the fall are associated with higher collision risks. Generally, these wea..., This dataset includes five years of spring and fall data compiled from three sources: (1) bird collision data from NYC Audubon's Project Safe Flight, (2) bird migration traffic data processed from the KOKX radar station, and (3) historical weather data from LaGuardia Airport weather station. 
The bird collision data from NYC Audubon's Project Safe Flight was collected at a total of 27 buildings in NYC across 11 spring/fall monitoring seasons. Volunteer collision monitors walked a route consisting of 1 to 6 buildings once per day and, for each building, recorded their monitoring start and end times and the number of birds they found. 
Weather data are from the LaGuardia Airport weather station and provide local, proximate measurements of observed weather conditions at ground-level. Values included in this dataset are mean nocturnal (dusk-dawn) values of the following measurements: zonal (east-west) and meridional (north-south) wind components, cloud ceiling height, visibility distance, a..., , # Heavy migration traffic and bad weather are a dangerous combination: bird collisions in New York City

The collisions_weather_migration_spring_fall_dataset.csv file contains all of the variables included in our final spring and fall generalized linear mixed effects models of the effects of weather and migration traffic on bird collisions with buildings in New York, NY, 2017-2021.

Note that the buildings that were monitored for collisions were known or expected to be high collision hazards and were specifically chosen to increase the likelihood of detecting collision events under a range of weather conditions. Thus, this dataset's sample is not necessarily representative of citywide collision rates. Also note that the KOKX radar station, where we obtained the data used for our migration traffic variable, is located just under 100 km from NYC. As such, this metric was not a direct calculation of the number of migrants in NYC and was treated as a regional measure of migration activity i...