Will Satellites and Supercomputers Improve Bird Watching

　　Add space satellites and supercomputers to the listof birdwatching tools.

　　Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory andCornell University's Lab of Ornithology are combiningthose high-tech tools with a database of birdsightings contributed by birdwatchers to learn howclimate change is affecting bird movement in theUnited States.

　　"The approach we're taking here is we're trying tobring together as much environmental data as we canto try to understand what influences the birdmigration," said Bob Cook, a distinguished research scientist at ORNL involved with theeffort. "We're trying to address a really important question with regard to climate change: Howmight climate change influence the migration patterns of birds?"

　　That includes information about rainfall, temperature and snow cover, as well as the start ofspring greening and the composition of land cover—forested, urbanized or grassland, forexample.

　　The land cover information is drawn from a NASA satellite sensor, MODIS—that's short for"Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer". Bird sightings are taken from an onlinedatabase run by Cornell and the National Audubon Society. Launched in 2003, E-bird allows"citizen scientists" to submit detailed reports via an Internet checklist.

　　Combining and analyzing all that data will require computing might provided by TeraGrid, aNational Science Foundation-administered network of supercomputers.

　　Steve Kelling, director of information science at Cornell's ornithology lab, said the new projectwill allow scientists to link bird sightings to climate conditions.

　　Via the seven-year-old E-bird database—which accepts observations recorded a century ago, aswell as present-day bird sightings—"we have really good information on the location whereobservations were made," Kelling said. "We can link those with other kinds of environmentalobservations, like land cover, type of climate, temperature, elevation and humandemographic information."

　　Adding in the MODIS satellite data provides information about when spring greening begins andwhen fall starts, he said, two things that seem to be important environmental cues for birdmigration.

　　Potential for a fatal mismatch

　　Eventually, the scientists would like to develop models that can forecast how future climateshifts might affect bird populations.

　　"We'd like to be able to shift the greening index to occur two weeks earlier or two weeks laterand see if that influences the model's predictions of when birds will arrive at certain latitudes,"Kelling said.

　　Climate change could produce a mismatch between a bird species' cue to migrate or nest andthe availability of food, he noted, a phenomenon that's been observed with some species inEurope. For example, if the American Robin miscalculates spring and arrives before the insects iteats are ready, the birds could starve.