(IVAR) - Final Report - Strategic Environmental Research and ...

1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND
Encroachment has made once-rural military facilities islands of habitat diversity surrounded by
seas of urbanization. Military bases and ranges have become refugia for birds and other wildlife.
Consequently, the military’s already significant role as a steward of their environment – in some
locations including species with protected status – has increased. Now encroachment is increasing
inside the fence line, as facilities take on more and more activities to remain mission- relevant.
These trends are straining the ability of natural resource management (NRM) personnel to protect
the wildlife at these facilities while ensuring the military can prepare and train for its primary
missions. Similarly, Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) managers at airfields and training ranges
must know the behavior and ecology of resident and migratory birds in order to reduce bird strikes
that cause more than $600M/Yr in damage to U.S. military and civilian aircraft, plus the danger
they pose to aircrews and passengers.
The management of resident and migratory birds must also be accomplished while managers
operate under a mandate to “do more with less”. Military resource managers need tools that
yield better situational awareness, provide a clearer understanding of where and when birds are
present, what attracts them to certain locations, and how changes in the natural or manmade
environments affect their distribution. Current sampling methods (e.g., visual observations) are
slow, non-continuous, not well suited to real-time situational awareness, and expensive,
particularly for large facilities. Visual census methods, while effective during daylight, are
unreliable from dusk to dawn, when the most bird migration is greatest, and when it is essential
to sample at the elevations and ranges of nighttime birds. Similarly, BASH programs need better
information suitable for both planning missions and avoiding bird strikes, information based on
timely acquisition and processing of data on bird abundance and movement.
Nohara, et al. (2005, 2007) and Herricks and Key (2007) and others have discussed how
inexpensive marine radars have been adapted to detect and track birds and other biological
targets. Only recently has digital, automatic radar signal processing (i.e., automatic detection and
tracking) and Internet connectivity provided the promise of full utility from avian radar systems.
Such radars have been developed for, and successfully used by, the Navy for some time, but this
use is limited to a few locations. Before digital avian radar systems can be applied systematically
to NRM and BASH issues on military lands, demonstrations are needed to document how
improvements in the capabilities of avian radar systems meet the needs of users. These
demonstrations must to be carried out across different sampling locations and times, monitor
varying bird populations, and incorporate site-based radar configurations. Demonstrations under
these conditions will validate the benefits that this technology brings to broader military use.
Such demonstrations and the reports arising from them will advance user
awareness of the tool’s availability and contribute the integration of new types of information on
bird population dynamics. Such contributions will improve monitoring methods and provide
better support for military flight operations.
Section 2.3 outlines the user-based-requirements analysis that led to the development of the
enhanced BirdRad, or eBirdRad, avian radar system and subsequently to the IVAR Project.
Table 1-1 maps those general statements of requirements against IVAR Project Tasks. The
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