An apparent breakthrough that should be instrumental in protecting birds from crashing into windows and tall buildings when migrating at night. Photometrics AI, a street-lighting optimization company, is now using bird migration forecasts as part of its lighting management platform. Cities can now use the Photometrics AI platform, which provides an automated feature that dims lights when information from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's BirdCast bird migration monitoring system signals a big migration night that poses high risks for bird-window collisions. Their new AI technology helps to protect birds by automatically dimming lights when it matters most.
While BirdCast provides birders with useful information about bird migration that can be used to decide where and when to go birding, BirdCast's Migration Alerts serve an important conservation need too. City lights disorient birds and draw migrants closer to buildings where they are known to collide with windows, sometimes in horrifying numbers in a single night, much less during an entire spring or fall migration season. The Photometrics AI company's platform uses BirdCast information to enable real-time lighting adjustments during peak migration events and reduce the number of birds colliding with buildings, which has the potential to make a huge difference city by city, and on a conservation scale.
"Street lighting represents one of the largest sources of artificial light at night in urban areas," said Ari Isaak, founder of Photometrics AI. "By connecting our optimization platform to BirdCast's real-time migration data, cities can take meaningful conservation action that runs automatically – not as a one-time campaign, but as an ongoing operational capability."
BirdCast uses weather radar to detect the number of birds migrating across the continental United States. One segment of BirdCast produces nightly forecasts of migration intensity up to 3 days in advance. BirdCast also provides information in the Migration Dashboard feature that illustrates the intensity (numbers) and flight direction, speed, and altitude, along with nightly and seasonal timing of nocturnal migration. The bird migration forecast information is also used to create Migration Alerts when migration intensity reaches significant levels.
Each year, more than 1 Billion birds die in the United States from collisions with buildings and windows. Bright city lights disorient migrating birds, attracting them toward urban areas and in close proximity to structures where collisions can be deadly, including corporate buildings, university campuses, residential homes, skyscrapers, greenhouses, and glass-enclosed bus stops. The problem of light pollution is accelerating, and according to research published in Science, the night sky is becoming 10 percent brighter each year, and in some cities the night sky is twice as bright as it was 8 years ago. The brighter the sky, the greater the negative impacts on birds' senses while migrating, and the fewer stars visible for orientation and navigation.
Clearly, the use of the new Photometrics AI platform could have immediate affects in cities and developments where it is utilized during Migration Alerts provided by BirdCast. To learn more, you can refer to Photometrics AI Integrates Data from Bird Migration Forecasts to Automatically Dim Streetlights to Protect Birds | Photometrics AI | Street Lighting Optimization and also check into Migration Alerts – BirdCast