During my undergraduate career, I created a project which used weather radar (NEXRAD) to measure the relative abundance of a migratory Tree Swallow roost in Old Lyme, Connecticut. The project searched for effects of weather conditions on the relative abundance of the roost, as well as tested novel methods to measuring abundances of migratory roosts using weather radar. We found that roost abundance decreased with higher wind speeds during its emergence, and when wind speeds were high on the day prior to emergence. We were also able to measure a seasonal trend in roost abundance, with peak abundance occurring in late August. The project was published in Wilson’s Journal of Ornithology.
I am currently working on a project which is evaluating the impact of adverse weather events on banding productivity, using the large dataset provided by the Mapping Avian Productivity and Survivorship program, which has almost 30 years of banding station data across over 1000 banding stations. The project aims to assess the impact of weather on overall banding efficiency, determine which bird conservation regions are more vulnerable to adverse weather conditions (rain, high winds, and high temperatures), and determine if adverse weather conditions have increasingly affected banding efforts over the history of the MAPS program.