Storks, thermals and drones: A project overview and preliminary results

Animals adapt their movement strategy following the variations of the energy landscape, to minimize cost of transport and maximize access to resources. Large bird species like the white stork Ciconia ciconia have adapted to make use of updrafts, including thermals, to spend very little energy during migration. This updraft availability, however, varies considerably on a temporal and a spatial scale. During my PhD, I will try to collect atmospheric data and imagery of the environment with drones to decrypt the fine-scale dynamics of soaring environments on storks’s migratory routes, and how habitat type influences these dynamics. But bird migration isn’t just determined by the dynamism of the air, it’s also determined by the use of ground resources. Storks have been increasingly relying on landfills for food, leading to changes in their migration patterns. Therefore, I will use drones to study fluctuations in stork numbers at landfills and other stopover sites during migration and see how we can combine drone imagery and computer vision methods to carry out more precise censuses than with ground-based methods. In this week’s talk, I will present an overview of this PhD project, in addition to some preliminary results from the field season I’ve just returned from.