Lidar as a potential tool for monitoring migratory insects

Chen, Hui; Li, Meng; Månefjord, Hampus; Travers, Paul; Salvador, Jacobo; Müller, Lauro; Dreyer, David; Alison, Jamie; Høye, Toke T.; Gao Hu,; Warrant, Eric; Brydegaard, Mikkel

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2024.109588

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 47 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A variety of methods have been introduced to automatically monitor insects during flight. Insects have been observed by video cameras (Riley 1994), optical sensors (Reynolds and Riley 2002) and lidar instruments (Shaw et al 2005, Chen et al 2024, but radar has proved to be one of the most effective tools for observing insect flight (Drake and Reynolds 2012). As remotesensing instrumentation, radars operate in a stand-alone way and on a time resolution usually ranging between seconds (cloud radars, BirdScan radars) to minutes (weather radars).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Derivation of aerial insect concentration with a 94 GHz FMCW cloud radar

Lochmann,

Kalesse-Los,

Haest

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Aerial insects are vital for nature and society. Though methods to observe flying insects have consistently improved in the last decades, insects remain difficult to monitor systematically and consistently over large spatial and temporal scales. Remote sensing with radars has proved to be one of the more effective tools for observation. However, as radars are most sensitive to targets similar in size to the radar wavelength, the detectable sub-group of aerial insects of a certain size range depends on the employed radar. Here, we present a novel method based on data of a zenith-pointing W-band (94 GHz, lambda = 0.32 cm) Doppler cloud radar to estimate insect concentration in a vertical profile. Multiple meteorological state-of-the-art algorithms are combined to extract insect signals from the radar data and quantify their abundance from 50m to 1000m above the ground. For evaluation, this method is applied to Doppler cloud radar data from a summertime 30 day observation period in central Germany. Results are compared to data from an X-band (9.4 GHz, lambda = 3.2 cm) radar in the same region. Aerial insect concentration derived from the W-band radar, which is sensitive to insects in the mm size range, is substantially higher than from the X-band radar, detecting insects in the cm size range. In addition, diel flight timings vary between the different sub-groups of aerial insects observed by the two radar instruments. With its superior sensitivity to smaller insects like aphids, the proposed methodology complements existing entomological radar techniques and contributes to achieving a more complete description of aerial insect activity.

show abstract