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

5.3 DESIGN AND LAYOUT OF TECHNOLOGY AND METHODOLOGY
COMPONENTS
Figure 2-7 provides a schematic representation of, and Section 2.4.3 a description of, the major
components of the avian radar systems evaluated by the IVAR project, including:
• Automated Radar Scheduler, ARS (page 20)
• Digital Radar Processor, DRP (page 17)
• Network connectivity (page 20)
• Radar Data Server, RDS (page 17)
• Radar Fusion Engine, RFE (page 20)
• Radar Remote Controller, RRC (page 20)
• Radar Transceiver, RST (page 14)
• TrackViewer® Workstation, TVW (page 17)
Figure 2-8 is notional representation of how these components might be deployed at an
operational site; the actual location of these components (principally, the RST & DRP) at the
IVAR study locations is described in the subsections of Section 4. Additional information about
the location of and interaction between the components is provided in the Performance Criteria
write-ups in Section 5.6, as appropriate.
5.4 FIELD TESTING
Because the avian radar systems evaluated by the IVAR project were already operational when
the field testing began, many of the demonstrations could be performed using data that were, or
could be, collected during of their routine operation. Only the demonstrations of automatic
tracking were time-sensitive and required advanced scheduling – to coincide with spring and fall
migrations at the facilities on the east and west coasts. The automatic tracking field tests
involved deploying teams of observers to the study locations without setup and shutdown of the
radar systems per se.
The descriptions in this section provide background to and an overview of the tests that were
performed for each of the five major performance objectives: Automatic Tracking, Sampling
Protocols, Data Streaming, Data Integration, and Data Fusion. Where appropriate, a crossreference
is provided at the end of these descriptions to the Performance Assessment subsection
that contains the detailed objectives, methods, results and conclusion for that test.
Automatic Tracking
The core question addressed by this objective is whether software can automatically detect and
track birds as well as or better than a trained radar ornithologist observing the same returns on an
analog radar display. Moreover, because avian radars were originally developed by adapting
radars built for other purposes (i.e., they were not “built-to-spec”), a more fundamental question
needed to be answered first: Are the targets the human observers – and now the automatic
algorithms – tracking really birds Before the IVAR project, there had been few published
attempts to “ground truth” analog avian radars (Burger, 1997), and none for digital systems.
Consequently, the IVAR project set as its first test of the automatic tracking capabilities of avian
radars the ground-truthing of the targets. We proposed to carry out these ground-truthing studies
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