TY - JOUR
TI - Beware the Boojum: Caveats and Strengths of Avian Radar
AU - Beason, R
AU - Nohara, T
AU - Weber, P
T2 - Human-Wildlife Interactions
AB - 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.
DA - 2015/03//
PY - 2015
VL - 7
IS - 1
SP - 16
EP - 46
UR - https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0786/73eb0501a848e3ed4a02c64406bfdfb887ff.pdf
DO - 10.26077/0fvy-6k61
LA - English
KW - Birds
ER -