Golden eagles travel far distances, crossing mountains, grasslands, and national borders over the course of a year. People trying to protect these birds are using NASA-funded research to understand their journeys and help make them safer.
Supported by NASA’s Earth Action Ecological Conservation program, scientists are combining GPS tracking data from golden eagles with satellite observations, including data from Landsat, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, and the Global Precipitation Measurement mission. The data feed decision support tools that help wildlife managers see the routes eagles take during migration, where they spend the winter, and what hazards they encounter across broad, connected landscapes such as the Yellowstone-to-Yukon region, one of North America’s most important mountain corridors.
Linking eagle migration with information about vegetation, snow cover, and seasonal conditions helps reveal how the birds respond to changing environments. In some cases, that knowledge is already shaping conservation work on the ground.
In Alaska, for example, biologists used tracking data from golden eagles tagged in Denali National Park and Preserve to identify winter areas where some birds may be vulnerable to electrocution on power poles. That information helped guide mitigation work to retrofit poles in places used by Denali’s eagles, reducing a known source of mortality outside protected areas.
Some of those same golden eagle movements and satellite data also appear in a new visualization from the Room to Roam: Y2Y Wildlife Movements project, led by Ohio State University and part of a NASA-funded effort to better understand how bears, wolves, caribou, birds, and other wildlife move through the Yellowstone-to-Yukon corridor.
The work shows how animal tracking and Earth observations can complement each other.
~Emily DeMarco
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