Reshaping avian migration in the Anthropocene — continental scale attraction to artificial light at night revealed
Kyle G. Horton, Colorado State University, kyle.horton@colostate.edu (Presenter)
Jeffrey J. Buler, University of Delaware, jbuler@udel.edu
Sharolyn J. Anderson, National Park Service, sharolyn_anderson@nps.gov
Carolyn S. Burt, Colorado State University, carolyn.burt@colostate.edu
Amy Collins, Colorado State University, amy.collins@colostate.edu
Adriaan Dokter, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, amd427@cornell.edu
Fengyi Guo, Princeton university, fyguo@princeton.edu
Daniel Sheldon, University of Massachusetts, sheldon@cs.umass.edu
Monika Tomaszewska, Michigan State University, monikat@msu.edu
Geoffrey Henebry, Michigan State University, henebryg@msu.edu
As billions of nocturnal avian migrants traverse North America, twice a year they must contend with ever-changing landscapes driven by natural and anthropogenic forces, including the rapid growth of artificial glow of the night sky. While airspaces facilitate migrant passage, terrestrial landscapes serve as essential areas to restore energy reserves and often act as refugia -- making it critical to holistically identify stopover locations and understand drivers of use. Leveraging over 10 million remote sensing observations, we developed seasonal contiguous US layers of bird migrant stopover density. Across the US, in over 70% of our models we identify skyglow as a highly influential and consistently positive predictor of bird migration stopover density. This finding points to an expanding threat to avian migrants: peri-urban illuminated areas may act as ecological traps at macroscales, bringing migrants into dangerous, modified habitats.
Poster: Poster_Horton_3-25_44_35.pdf
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 3-25
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 3
Session Date: Thu (May 11) 3:00-5:00 PM
CCE Program: BDEC