AMoveE 2014: Kasper Thorup
Channel: Movebank
Date: 23/05/2014

This talk was presented by Kasper Thorup on 5 May 2014 as part of the Symposium on Animal Movement and the Environment, held at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Thorup K, 2014, "Linking long-distance migration and resources"

Abstract: Recent developments in tracking technology have allowed mapping individual inter-continental migrations of several songbird species. Accurate spatio-temporal location data potentially allow an evaluation of how seasonal vegetation changes ultimately drive the current migration schedules. We correlate the migration three smaller land bird species, common cuckoo, red-backed shrike and thrush nightingale migrating between the Palearctic and Southern Africa with changes in seasonal vegetation greenness as estimated by the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index. The tracks were related to the observed changes though we found species-specific differences as to whether migration schedules optimised vegetation greenness or were related to resource peaks.