FATBIRD: A Tool for Flight and Trajectories Analyses of Birds

Abstract

Abstract-Analyzing flyways of birds is one approach ornithologists pursue e.g. to be able to detect potential risks during the animal's migration. But this analysis is not trivial and the functionalities of existing supporting tools are neither perfect nor all-encompassing. In this paper, we introduce our new FATBIRD Tool, which not only visualizes flyways or arbitrary trajectories, but also helps the researchers in several aspects of the analysis. Similarities between all trajectories of the individual birds are calculated via Dynamic Time Warping distances, which is to the best of our knowledge the first usage in this field and delivers promising results. We show the functionalities of our tool on a use case based on real data of a GPS/GSM telemetry study of Eurasian curlews of the "Bavarian Society for the Protection of Birds". The similarities are shown in an intuitively understandable heat map colored distance matrix as well as a hierarchical clustering dendrogram. The clustering of all data points is performed and shown, and the data can be filtered by several parameters. With that, potential stop-over and wintering areas can be detected very fast and easily. After having obtained the similarities and differences of the trajectories in an automatic way, the researchers can focus on the biological reasons of the generated results of the FATBIRD Tool. These can lead to a better understanding of e.g. why certain birds die on their flyways and thus to new approaches to develop optimized conservation measures for the specific species.