Matterful moments Understanding, predicting, and protecting mass movements of birds in a human-altered landscape

The airspace is an essential habitat for billions of animals, yet it is increasingly affected by wind energy, aviation, buildings, artificial light, noise, and other human activities. These pressures are especially acute during short periods of intense bird movement, termed ‘matterful moments’ in this thesis, when large numbers of birds occupy the airspace simultaneously. This thesis develops approaches to identify, predict, and protect such moments using weather radar, ecological simulations, machine learning, and citizen-science data. A hybrid forecasting framework improves predictions of peak nocturnal migration and supports targeted wind-turbine curtailment. However, further analysis shows that weather-related factors do not provide a sufficiently distinctive fingerprint to explain the largest migration peaks, suggesting that further improvements will require complementary information on the abundance, phenology, and availability of birds upstream. High-resolution, spatially-explicit radar analyses further reveal substantial spatial variation in migration intensity, providing a basis for nature-inclusive infrastructure planning and spatially differentiated mitigation. The thesis further demonstrates the severe disturbance caused by New Year’s Eve fireworks, particularly among large waterbirds in open and wet habitats, and identifies opportunities for targeted mitigation of their impacts. Together, these studies advance dynamic aeroconservation by transforming large-scale observations of aerial movement into actionable forecasts and maps, enabling more proactive and precise protection of wildlife in an increasingly crowded airspace.