Towards monitoring, understanding and forecasting Global Biomass flows of Aerial Migrations (GloBAM)

GloBAM is a BioDivERsa (www.biodiversa.org) research project with partners in Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, The Netherlands and the USA.

Migratory animals play significant roles in shaping ecosystems through a variety of transport and trophic effects that also represent services and disservices to human infrastructure, agriculture and welfare. Their aerial and terrestrial habitats have changed dramatically over the past decades and are expected to change further, particularly from rapid climate change, increased urbanization, wind energy installations, and habitat fragmentation. Within GloBAM, we aim at quantifying the biomass flows of aerial migrants from regional to continental scales in Europe and North America and over time-scales from days to years from weather radar data. We are particularly interested in identifying the drivers of movements and migrant abundances and will relate the timing and intensity of movements to a suite of atmospheric, climatic and landscape/habitat variables. For these external variables, we will use their past and present distributions but also develop scenarios of potential future changes and explore their implications for aerial migrants.

The GloBAM project website can be found at: https://globam.science