Beware the Boojum: Caveats and Strengths of Avian Radar

• Main Authors: Robert C. Beason, Tim J. Nohara, Peter Weber
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Utah State University 2017-02-01
• Series: Human-Wildlife Interactions
• Subjects: aircraft; avian radar; bash; bird strike; conservation; environmental impact assessment; human–wildlife conflicts; mobile radar; marine radar; natural resource management; ornithology
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/hwi/vol7/iss1/4

Radar provides a useful and powerful tool to wildlife biologists and ornithologists. However, radar also has the potential for errors on a scale not previously possible. In this paper, we focus on the strengths and limitations of avian surveillance radars that use marine radar front-ends integrated with digital radar processors to provide 360° of coverage. Modern digital radar processors automatically extract target information, including such various target attributes as location, speed, heading, intensity, and radar cross-section (size) as functions of time. Such data can be stored indefinitely, providing a rich resource for ornithologists and wildlife managers. Interpreting these attributes in view of the sensor’s characteristics from which they are generated is the key to correctly deriving and exploiting application-specific information about birds and bats. We also discuss (1) weather radars and air-traffic control surveillance radars that could be used to monitor birds on larger, coarser spatial scales; (2) other nonsurveillance radar configurations, such as vertically scanning radars used for vertical profiling of birds along a particular corridor; and (3) Doppler, single-target tracking radars used for extracting radial velocity and wing-beat frequency information from individual birds for species identification purposes.