David Winkler | Searcharxiv

arXiv2020

Detecting and Tracking Communal Bird Roosts in Weather Radar Data

The US weather radar archive holds detailed information about biological phenomena in the atmosphere over the last 20 years. Communally roosting birds congregate in large numbers at nighttime roosting locations, and their morning exodus from the roost is often visible as a distinctive pattern in radar images. This paper describes a machine learning system to detect and track roost signatures in weather radar data. A significant challenge is that labels were collected opportunistically from previous research studies and there are systematic differences in labeling style. We contribute a latent variable model and EM algorithm to learn a detection model together with models of labeling styles for individual annotators. By properly accounting for these variations we learn a significantly more accurate detector. The resulting system detects previously unknown roosting locations and provides comprehensive spatio-temporal data about roosts across the US. This data will provide biologists important information about the poorly understood phenomena of broad-scale habitat use and movements of communally roosting birds during the non-breeding season.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Statistical Inference on Tree Swallow Migrations with Random Forests

Bird species' migratory patterns have typically been studied through individual observations and historical records. In recent years however, the eBird citizen science project, which solicits observations from thousands of bird watchers around the world, has opened the door for a data-driven approach to understanding the large-scale geographical movements. Here, we focus on the North American Tree Swallow (\textit{Tachycineta bicolor}) occurrence patterns throughout the eastern United States. Migratory departure dates for this species are widely believed by both ornithologists and casual observers to vary substantially across years, but the reasons for this are largely unknown. In this work, we present evidence that maximum daily temperature is a major factor influencing Tree Swallow occurrence. Because it is generally understood that species occurrence is a function of many complex, high-order interactions between ecological covariates, we utilize the flexible modeling approach offered by random forests. Making use of recent asymptotic results, we provide formal hypothesis tests for predictive significance various covariates and also develop and implement a permutation-based approach for formally assessing interannual variations by treating the prediction surfaces generated by random forests as functional data. Each of these tests suggest that maximum daily temperature has a significant effect on migration patterns.

q-bio.PE↗