UN Initiative To Establish A Global Atlas On Animal Migration Sets Milestone With Launch Of New Bird Migration Atlas
Editor
May 26, 2022
Visualizing how migratory animals connect continents, countries, sites and habitats are the result of an international scientific effort under the aegis of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), in developing the first atlas of bird migration across three continents.
CMS, an environmental UN treaty, will launch the Eurasian-African Bird Migration Atlas today at the Museum of Migration on the Italian island of Ventotene, as the first part of a broader initiative to develop a global atlas of animal migration.
The interactive Atlas is an online platform where data on the movements in time and space of millions of birds are mapped and analyzed in the Eurasian-African flyway. Researchers from 10 different institutions and data gathered by over 50 different organizations contributed to the Atlas, which was developed by CMS partners, the European Union for Bird Ringing (EURING) and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
A major accomplishment of the Eurasian-African Bird Migration Atlas is to have collated, analyzed, and synthesized bird ringing data collected over more than 100 years on 300 species.
In addition, for over 100 of these species, the online mapping tool overlays movement patterns identified through bird ringing with tracks obtained through satellite transmitters, GPS-GSM tags or geo-locators. Together, they provide the most complete information available on the migration routes of these species.
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