Wildlife Hazard Assessment Products
Accipiter® Avian Radars are ideal bird sampling tools for use in wildlife hazard assessments (WHA) carried out by wildlife biologists and consulting professionals to characterize bird utilization and hazards at military and civil airports. The continuous, 24/7 recording of bird target data supplements visual point counts around the airport or airfield, providing night-time monitoring as well. This data can be correlated with visual counts, providing observations at much farther ranges (beyond 10 km from the airport) covering 360º, and at altitudes from ground-level to at least 10,000’ AGL. Furthermore, continuous tracking and recording means that the sample size will be larger than visual sampling by orders of magnitude, providing statistically valid sample sizes much faster than other methods alone.
Accipiter’s proprietary, adjustable dish antennas ensure that 360° coverage with sampling at user-specified bands of altitudes is available. The result is 3-D trajectory information for all bird tracks, including updates every couple of seconds complete with latitude, longitude, height, speed, heading, and size information. The dish antenna can be adjusted to focus coverage on important locations such as around runway take-off and landing corridors for bird aircraft strike hazard (BASH) assessments. At night-time, it can be adjusted to better sample migration patterns for enroute strike monitoring.
Our patented M3™ multi-radar, multi-mission, multi-user information system (M3IS) organizes the recorded target data for complete user exploitation and analysis. It includes tools for target analytics and forensics, flexible replay, statistical analyses, and temporal and spatial distributions on abundance, altitude, heading, speed and size, along with open interfaces and tools that allow you to build your own analysis and reporting suite. The M3IS is flexible and powerful; it allows you to automatically build and organize unique relational databases of target data for each location where you are conducting a WHA. When revisiting a site on a recurring timetable, over seasonal cycles, or for a follow-on WHA, all of the date/time-stamped information from that site is organized together for immediate exploitation. As a result, your data sets are conveniently packaged for each location and your analysis suites will apply to each site. You can then easily and quickly generate arbitrary queries from a single database to calculate daily, monthly, seasonal, year-to-date and year-to-year distributions.
If you like, our engineers will build specialized tools for you in accordance with your own processing methodologies, combining information from other databases (e.g., point count data) as required. Alternatively, we will teach you how to exploit our M3IS so that you can do it yourself.
A standard, trailer-based, single-radar, adjustable-dish configuration with associated M3™ information system provides a ready-to-go avian sampling system with a built-in generator and power system and a comfortable working environment. Accipiter® Avian Radars also offer a selection of options including the widest range of platforms (trailers, ground-based), antennas (horizontal and vertical arrays, single/dual-scanning dishes, multi-beam antennas) and transceivers (X-, S-band, conventional, solid-state, Doppler). Our engineers are happy to discuss and recommend variations to best suit your needs.
Accipiter® Avian Radars are fully compliant with the US FAA Advisory Circular(AC) 150/5220-25 "Airport Avian Radar Systems" and the Functional Performance Requirements Specification released under the Department of Defense’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program under the Integration and Validation of Avian Radar Project.
