DOI: 10.5061/dryad.wh70rxwkd
title: Data from: Spatiotemporal variation in disturbance impacts derived from simultaneous tracking of aircraft and shorebirds

description: 1. Assessing impacts of disturbance over large areas and long time periods
 is crucial for nature management, but also challenging since impacts
 depend on both wildlife responses to disturbance and on the spatiotemporal
 distribution of disturbance sources. Combined tracking of animals and
 disturbance sources enables quantification of wildlife responses as a
 function of the distance to a disturbance source. We provide a framework
 to derive such distance-response curves and combine those with disturbance
 source presence data to quantify energetic costs of disturbance at a
 landscape scale. 2. We tracked 90 Eurasian Oystercatchers Haematopus
 ostralegus and all aircraft in a military training area in the Dutch
 Wadden Sea. We quantified distance-response curves estimating flight
 probability and additional displacement for five types of aircraft
 activities, by comparing bird movement prior to aircraft presence with
 movement during aircraft presence. We then used the distance-response
 curves to map mean and variation in additional daily energy expenditure
 due to cumulative aircraft disturbance across the landscape for a 700-day
 period. 3. Flight probability and displacement responses differed strongly
 among aircraft activities and decreased from transport airplanes, through
 bombing jets, helicopters, jets to small civil airplanes. Since the most
 disturbing aircraft activities were also the rarest ones, mean additional
 daily energy expenditure did not exceed 0.25%. However, days with
 substantial (&gt;1%) additional expenditure occurred between 0.1% and
 3.7% of all days across high tide roosts in the tidal basin. Notably,
 expenditure particularly spiked on days with transport airplane activity
 (up to 8.5%). 4. Synthesis and applications. Cumulative energetic flight
 costs due to aircraft disturbance are low and unlikely to impact survival
 of oystercatchers in our study area. Our results provide evidence that the
 legal minimum flight height of 450m for small civil airplanes effectively
 limits disturbance of oystercatchers. Mitigation should focus on limiting
 the number of days when disturbance has a high impact by reducing rare but
 highly disturbing activities, especially transport airplanes. Our approach
 can be applied to other species and disturbance sources that are
 automatically tracked, e.g. boats and walkers, ultimately to quantify the
 entire anthropogenic disturbance landscape.
description: See main article for how data was collected and processed.
description: The dataset contains data on oystercatcher-aircraft interactions
 and raster files for the estimated additional daily energy expenditure due
 to aircraft disturbance.
 <strong>Oystercatcher-aircraft interaction data
 files. </strong>There is a separate file for interaction data for
 each combination of aircraft type and measurement duration. These are the
 following nine
 files: <em>Civil_96s.csv</em>, <em>Civil_10m.csv</em>, <em>Jet_10m.csv,</em> <em>Jet_1h.csv</em>, <em>BombingJet_10m.csv</em>, <em>BombingJet_1h.csv</em>, <em>Helicopter_1h.csv</em>, <em>Transport_10m.csv</em>, <em>Transport_1h.csv</em>. <em>interaction_column_description.csv </em>contains a description of each column in these data files.  <strong>Maps for additional daily energy expenditure</strong>. Two files contain the estimates for additional daily energy expenditure (DEE). <em>Raster_DEE_StudyArea.csv </em>contains estimates for the average additional daily energy expenditure (in %) for each aircraft type in the study area for the whole study period, and is the data underlying Figures 6a-f and 7. <em>Raster_DEE_Civil_JulySeptember2018.csv </em>contains estimates for the average additional daily energy expenditure (in %) for small civil aircraft in the whole Dutch Wadden Sea for July-September 2018, and is the data underlying Figure 6g. Both files are raster files where RDS_x and RDY_y are the x and y coordinates of the middle point of grid cells with a size of 200x200m. The coordinates are in the Dutch Amersfoort / RD coordinate system (EPSG:7415), where one unit is one meter.  Please contact the authors for any requests on the data of aircraft tracks and military aircraft presence, which cannot be made publicly available.