Article Synopsis
- Billions of migratory birds travel across North America twice a year and face challenges from both natural changes and human-made factors, including increased artificial light at night.
- Researchers used over 10 million remote sensing observations to create maps showing where these birds stop to rest and recharge during migration.
- Their findings suggest that increased skyglow, especially in urban areas, may attract birds to dangerous locations, potentially leading to higher mortality rates during their migrations.
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Article Abstract
As billions of nocturnal avian migrants traverse North America, twice a year they must contend with landscape changes driven by natural and anthropogenic forces, including the rapid growth of the 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. Here, we leverage over 10 million remote sensing observations to develop seasonal contiguous United States layers of bird migrant stopover density. In over 70% of our models, we identify skyglow as a highly influential and consistently positive predictor of bird migration stopover density across the United States. This finding points to the potential of an expanding threat to avian migrants: peri-urban illuminated areas may act as ecological traps at macroscales that increase the mortality of birds during migration.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10696060 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43046-z | DOI Listing |
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