National Central University and the Kenting National Park Management Office yesterday said they had successfully tracked raptors, or diurnal birds of prey, migrating to the park and the surrounding area with the help of the weather radar.
At a press conference in Taipei, director of the university’s Institute of Space Science Pan Chen-jeih (潘貞杰) said weather radars were often used by scientists to monitor the migration of birds for such purposes as epidemic control, but until now scientists had been unable to effectively exclude the cloud and rain data from the images.
“When the radars pick up atmospheric signals, it becomes very difficult to track the raptor signals. What we have done is to create the world’s first system that can exclude atmospheric images, while retaining the raptor signals,” Pan said.
Pan said as hundreds of raptors, such as the gray-faced buzzard eagle, migrate to the park and the surrounding area, the birds form river-like lines that can be tracked by radar.
Lee Teng-chih (李登志), director of the office and a participant in Pan’s project, said the team members would provide real-time radar images of the migration to bird watchers at home and abroad on the Web so that bird watchers would know when and where they could see the birds.
“Japan has a sakura blossom forecast telling people when and where they can appreciate the beauty of the blossom and we would like to build a raptor migration forecast with our system,” Lee said.
Lee said the three-year project is expected to be completed by the end of next year.
At that time bird watchers will be able to check real-time radar images showing the birds’ migration routes to Kenting on their mobile phones or by logging onto Facebook or Twitter on the Internet.
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