More than 50 researchers flocked to the University of Delaware in August to share their research and learn about developments in aeroecology — the study of flying animals and how they interact with their environment.

The event — the Fourth International Radar Aeroecology Conference and Workshop — brought together researchers from around the world who use different types of radars (e.g., weather surveillance radar or vertically-looking radar) to learn more about the behaviors of bats, birds and insects. This was the first time the conference was held in North America and 12 different countries were represented, including the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

Jeffrey Buler, a professor of wildlife ecology in the UD Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, leads UD’s Aeroecology Program. He said the six-day workshop and conference was a chance for students, researchers, faculty, non-governmental organizations and businesses in a niche field to network with each other. 

“It’s a small community, but what’s interesting is it spans different disciplines,” Buler said. “We have computer scientists. We have meteorologists. We have entomologists. We have ornithologists.” 

People presented their research on various topics, including bird migration and weather radar, insects and weather radar, bat migration and population dynamics, and vultures’ foraging habits. 

Kyle Horton, who graduated University of Delaware in 2013 with a masters degree in wildlife ecology, presented research on how to characterize the critical airspaces migrating birds use to move north and south in spring and fall across the United States. 

Horton, who is now an assistant professor at Colorado State University’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, said most birds fly through the air on their migration 4 hours after local sunset. Conservation action is key, he said, to help migrating birds that face numerous challenges such as light pollution.

“Within the night we might say turn off your lights from sunset to sunrise,” Horton said. “But now we have a pretty concentrated time window so we’re always trying to maximize what people will help with.”

Ryan Neely, an associate professor of observational atmospheric science at the University of Leeds and the National Center for Atmospheric Science in the United Kingdom, presented to the group about how weather radar shows the population decline of nocturnal insects in the UK. 

“Most ecology studies are very data limited,” Neely said. “It’s really hard to collect this data and count insects. It’s really intensive. And here comes radars. With radars you can see huge spaces all the time. We’ve taken all that data and looked at the UK over the last almost decade, and we’ve tried to quantify whether there are trends in that or not.” 

Neely said nocturnal insect populations are declining, while insects that are active during the day “don’t have a significant trend.”

He added it was great to attend the conference and connect with so many people in and adjacent to his field.

“It’s just an amazing community of people,” Neely said, “that really care about making the world a better place and using data in unique and creative ways.”

The conference took place shortly before the new academic year began. As a first-year master’s student, Ginny Halterman was excited to soak it all in prior to joining Buler’s lab. She studies migrating birds in the Great Lakes region and what habitats those birds are using when they make pit stops there during their migration.

“It’s been really exciting to see what’s going on within radar aeroecology,” Halterman said. “I have a little bit of experience with radar on the bird side, but it’s been fun to learn about projects with insects, projects from people that might be on the more meteorological end, or bats even.” 

Halterman continued, “It's been really fun seeing the breadth of the field, and it’s given me a lot of ideas for my project.”

The group didn’t just learn about their peers’ research. They also met up to bird watch at the UD Farm, and took field trips to Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge and the Dover weather radar station. 

Buler said holding this year’s conference in Newark and showcasing Delaware birds and radar helps put UD on the map.

“It helps expose how UD is a leading institution in this field,” Buler said. 

The Fourth International Radar Ecology Conference and Workshop received financial support from the UD Data Science Institute, which sponsored the registration for two UD faculty and six graduate students to attend the conference.