Bird Strike Committee Proceedings
Date of this Version
August 2001
Abstract
The United States Bird Avoidance Model (US BAM) uses Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to analyze and correlate bird habitat, migration, and breeding characteristics with key environmental and human-made geospatial features. The application consists of raster grids covering the conterminous United States. The value for each grid pixel location is equivalent to the sum of the mean bird mass (in ounces) for all species present during one of four daily time periods (dawn, day, dusk, and night), for one of 26 two-week periods in a year. The US BAM is a desktop application that has an intuitive design and includes separate interfaces for multiple user profiles such as Air Crews, Flight Planners/Schedulers, and Environmental Planners. It was developed using ESRI’s ArcView GIS. Geo InSight has created this ArcView GIS functionality and interface in a web-based environment for the U.S. Air Force. Current and future enhancements to the US BAM include the creation of an environmental planner and civilian FAA interface, automating Digital Aeronautical Flight Information updates, allowing users to enter new routes, enhancing risk surface generation by linking species distributions to various landscape variables (e.g., topography, land use) and migration patterns, and developing the capability to display portions of bird species groups that compose the risk surface.