Program: How AI and Acoustics are Transforming our Understanding of Bird Migration presented by Benjamin Van Doren, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
****NOTE**** Today’s meeting will be a little different. The meeting will begin promptly at 7:00pm with our program speaker presentation via Zoom. The VSO will host the zoom meeting and also record the presentation for those that can’t attend live. After the speaker presentation, we will conclude our club meeting with regular business items such as field trips, bird sightings, committee reports, etc.
Benjamin earned a B.S. from Cornell Univ, a PhD from Oxford Univ, and did Postdoctoral research at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He has received achievement awards from the American Ornithological Society, Linnean Society of London, and Zoological Society of London. Currently, Benjamin is Assistant Professor, Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2022, as a postdoctoral researcher, he installed a sensitive microphone on Afton mountain at the Rockfish Gap Hawk Watch that recorded migrating bird calls every night from Sep to Nov. In this talk, Benjamin will discuss the latest scientific understanding of how migratory birds are impacted by a changing world, including how birds use urban areas, the challenges they face, and how we can help mitigate these impacts. He will focus on the role of new technologies in movement biology, including AI, machine learning, radar, and bioacoustics. Benjamin will also discuss his recent work on sociality in songbird migration, made possible by acoustic data collected at Rockfish Gap and a 1000-km transect through Appalachia.