@inproceedings{
zhao2023a,
title={A Semi-Automated System to Annotate Communal Roosts in Large-Scale Weather Radar Data},
author={Wenlong Zhao and Gustavo Perez and Zezhou Cheng and Maria Carolina Tiburcio Dias Belotti and Yuting Deng and Victoria Simons and Elske K Tielens and Jeffrey Kelly and Kyle Horton and Subhransu Maji and Daniel Sheldon},
booktitle={NeurIPS 2023 Computational Sustainability: Promises and Pitfalls from Theory to Deployment},
year={2023},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=N2qmwRMrzo}
}
We have developed a semi-automated system to annotate communal roosts of birds and bats in weather radar data. This system comprises detection, tracking, confounder filtering, and human screening components. We have deployed this system to gather information on swallows from 612,786 scans taken from 12 radar stations around the Great Lakes over 21 years. The 15,628 annotated roost signatures have uncovered population trends and phenological shifts in swallows and martins. These species are rapidly declining aerial insectivores, and the data gathered has facilitated crucial sustainability analyses. While human screening is still required with the deployed system, we estimate that the screening process is approximately 7$\times$ faster than manual annotation. Furthermore, we found that incorporating temporal signals enhances the deployed detector's performance, increasing the mean average precision (mAP) from 48.7\% to 56.3\%. Our ongoing work aims to expand the analysis to bird and bat roosts at a continental scale.
A Semi-Automated System to Annotate Communal Roosts in Large-Scale Weather Radar Data
Wenlong Zhao Gustavo Perez Zezhou Cheng Maria Carolina Tiburcio Dias Belotti Yuting Deng Victoria Simons Elske K Tielens Jeffrey Kelly Kyle Horton Subhransu Maji Daniel Sheldon