Jeremy David Ross

University of Oklahoma | ou · Oklahoma Biological Survey

Ever increasing numbers of wind turbines, communication towers, power lines, and aerial vehicles are clear evidence of our growing reliance on infrastructure in the lower aerosphere. As this infrastructure expands, it is important to understand public perceptions of an increasingly crowded sky. To gauge tolerance for aerial crowding, 251 participan...

Climate change is increasing aridity in grassland and desert habitats across the southwestern United States, reducing available resources and drastically changing the breeding habitat of many bird species. Increases in aridity reduce sound propagation distances, potentially impacting habitat soundscapes, and could lead to a breakdown of the avian s...

Overwintering is a key demographic stage for migratory birds but remains poorly understood, especially among multiple declining grassland bird species. The non‐breeding ranges all 4 species of longspur (i.e., chestnut‐collared [Calcarius ornatus], Smith's [C. pictus], Lapland [C. lapponicus], thick‐billed [Rhynchophanes mccownii]) overlap in Oklaho...

Climate change is increasing aridity in grassland and desert habitats across the southwestern United States, reducing available resources and drastically changing the breeding habitat of many bird species. Increases in aridity reduce sound propagation distances, potentially impacting habitat soundscapes, and could lead to a breakdown of the avian s...

As grasslands have become the most threatened ecosystem in North America, so too have many migratory obligate grassland birds. Chestnut-collared Longspurs (Calcarius ornatus) are a great example, as they have experienced an 89% population decline during the last 5 decades. We captured and tracked individuals during the winters of 20182019 and 20192...

Light‐level geolocators are popular bio‐logging tools, with advantageous sizes, longevity and affordability. Biologists tracking seabirds often presume geolocator spatial accuracies between 186 and 202 km from previously innovative, yet taxonomically, spatially and computationally limited, studies. Using recently developed methods, we investigated...

Species distribution models can be made more accurate by use of new “Spatiotemporal Exploratory Models” (STEMs), a type of spatially explicit ensemble model (SEEM) developed at the continental scale that averages regional models pixel by pixel. Although SEEMs can generate more accurate predictions of species distributions, they are computationally...

The Painted Bunting Passerina ciris is a Neotropical songbird which breeds primarily in the United States during the summer and migrates to Mexico, Central America, southern Florida, and the Caribbean over the winter. Male Painted Buntings are brightly coloured, which makes them highly sought after as pets, particularly in Mexico, Central America a...

In their 2015 Current Biology paper, Streby et al. [1] reported that Golden-winged Warblers (Vermivora chrysoptera), which had just migrated to their breeding location in eastern Tennessee, performed a facultative and up to “>1,500 km roundtrip” to the Gulf of Mexico to avoid a severe tornadic storm. From light-level geolocator data, wherein geogra...

Complex behavioral traits, such as those making up a migratory phenotype, are regulated by multiple environmental factors and multiple genes. We investigated possible relationships between microsatellite variation at two candidate genes implicated in the control of migratory behavior, Clock and Adcyap1, and several aspects of migratory life-history...

Genetic distances. The genetic distances (δμ2) computed for microsatellites within Clock and Adcyap1 and visualized on a Neighbor-joining tree. Results based on Clock genetic distances indicated Louisiana (LA) and Oklahoma (OK) as sister populations. Results based on Adcyap1 genetic distances indicated Louisiana and North Carolina (NC) as sister po...

Migratory phenotype of Painted Buntings. The top panel shows individual departure dates from Oklahoma at the end of the summer. The column “Migration” shows that the duration of fall migration, starting at the breeding ground in Oklahoma (USA) and ending at the molting ground in Sinaloa (Mexico), varies extensively between individuals. The details...

Observed (Ho) and expected (He) heterozygosity at Clock and Adcyap1. Significant p values (p < 0.05) indicating deviation from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) are marked with asterisks. (XLSX)

Linkage Disequilibrium (LD) results for microsatellite at Clock (locus 1) and Adcyap1 (locus 2). There is no indication that these two loci are in LD (p > 0.05). (XLSX)

TESS3 Q matrix output for Clock, Adcyap1, and neutral loci. The graphs show the cluster assignment probabilities for Painted Buntings sampled in three populations (OK = Oklahoma; LA = Louisiana; NC = North Carolina) for K = 2. The probability (Q) of each population to be assigned to a cluster is shown on the vertical axes in panel a, b, and c. Each...

Microsatellite allele size variation at Clock and Adcyap1 across Painted Bunting populations. Values are reported for each allele (allele-A and allele-B) and for the average of the two alleles. Allele-A indicates short alleles and allele-B indicates long alleles. (XLSX)

Small-bodied terrestrial animals such as songbirds (Order Passeriformes) are especially vulnerable to hail-induced mortality; yet, hail events are challenging to predict, and they often occur in locations where populations are not being studied. Focusing on nesting grassland songbirds, we demonstrate a novel approach to estimate hail-induced mortal...

Aeroecological processes, especially powered flight of animals, can rapidly connect biological communities across the globe. This can have profound consequences for evolutionary diversification, energy and nutrient transfers, and the spread of infectious diseases. The latter is of particular consequence for human populations, since migratory birds...

All aggregate biological phenomena in the aerosphere are due to the behaviors of unique individuals acting according to their own rules of behavior and perceived external stimuli. An appealing characteristic of aeroecology is that we can observe both these aggregate behaviors of large groups (using tools such as radar and observational networks) as...

Aeroecological processes, especially powered flight of animals, can rapidly connect biological communities across the globe. This can have profound consequences for evolutionary diversification, energy and nutrient transfers, and the spread of infectious diseases. The latter is of particular consequence for human populations, since migratory birds...

Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) will reuse massive nests placed high in trees over multiple years, potentially exposing them to catastrophe loss during severe storms. The stochasticity of localized weather, however, has traditionally been viewed as impeding the quantitative study of such risks. In March 2015 a severe weather outbreak along t...

Migratory animals often go to extraordinary lengths to follow broad-scale changes in the spatial distributions of food resources over time. An example is the molt-migration system of songbirds in the central and western United States, wherein birds interrupt migratory movements to molt their feathers in the ephemerally productive North American mon...

The impact of evolving migratory behavior on brain organization in birds has been a foundational question in the emerging field of neuroecology. One generalization that seems to be approaching consensus is that migratory species/populations have smaller brain volumes than their nonmigratory comparison groups. The lark sparrow (Chondestes grammacus)...

A multi-sensor data fusion approach via acoustics, infrared camera (IR), and marine radar is proposed and described in the application of avian monitoring. The ultimate scope of avian monitoring is to preserve the population of birds and bats especially those listed in endangered list, by observing their activity and behavior over the migration per...

In August 2013, we observed a high incidence (44%) of synchronous bands of reduced melanin (a type of fault bar we have termed " pallid bands ") across the rectrices of juvenile Grasshopper Sparrows (Ammodrammus savannarum) captured near El Reno, Oklahoma. Earlier that year, on May 31, the site was struck by a severe storm which rained hailstones e...

In August 2013, we observed a high incidence (44%) of synchronous fault bars across the rectrices of juvenile Grasshopper Sparrows ( Ammodrammus savannarum ) captured near El Reno, Oklahoma. Earlier that year, on May 31, the site was struck by a severe storm which rained hailstones exceeding 5.5 cm diameter and spawned an historic 4.2 km-wide torna...

In August 2013, we observed a high incidence (44%) of synchronous fault bars across the rectrices of juvenile Grasshopper Sparrows ( Ammodrammus savannarum ) captured near El Reno, Oklahoma. Earlier that year, on May 31, the site was struck by a severe storm which rained hailstones exceeding 5.5 cm diameter and spawned an historic 4.2 km-wide torna...

A central concern in neuroscience can simply be brought down to the question of how a brains organization relates to its great diversity of functions. It is generally agreed that this relation must be based on multiscale organizational principles, ranging from the macroscopic level of the entire organ down to the cellular and molecular level. The f...

Two general migration strategies prevail among temperate-breeding migratory songbirds of North America. Most “Eastern” birds migrate relatively directly from breeding to wintering grounds immediately after molting, whereas a substantial proportion of “Western” species depart breeding grounds early, and molt during extended migratory stopovers befor...

A radar monitoring system is implemented to evaluate the birds activity and their quantification in the western basin of lake Erie in Ohio. This location is a habitat stopover for migratory birds and also it is a putative area for constructing wind farm. The radar monitoring is performed in three steps consist of data acquisition, blip detections,...

There are large number of reports regarding bird and bat mortality due to strikes with turbine blades in wind farm applications. This issue is threatening the avian life especially migratory birds and bats. Avian monitoring techniques can be used to detect bird and bats, assess their activity, and make intelligent decision for construction of wind...

Nocturnally migratory birds and bats are at higher risk of colliding with wind turbines. It is important to gather scientific data in an area which have potential of wind farm development. An IR camera recording and its analysis can provide necessary information to wildlife biologists involve with interaction of birds/bats with wind turbines. An ef...

Quantifiable geographic variation in DNA or morphology is often used to gauge past and present levels of population interchange and has thus helped define taxonomic boundaries, resolve evolutionary histories, and develop effective conservation strategies to preserve evolutionary diversity. We examined rangewide patterns of genetic (mtDNA and micros...

Chiropteran monitoring has become an important public concern given that wind turbines pose the threat of injury or death to bats through direct impact or barotraumas. Such monitoring therefore requires robust methodology to assess the local density, temporal activity, and diversity of bats. This work develops machine learning based monitoring appr...

Among passerines not nesting in cavities, mixed maternity within a clutch is rare and has been recorded at <1% of the nests of four North American species. Using genetic methods, we report the first case of mixed maternity in the Lark Sparrow (Chondestes grammacus). Within an unusually large clutch in Texas, we found that the attending female s...

A bird and bat monitoring system has been developed that uses marine radar, IR camera and acoustic recorders for wind farm applications. IR video recording is used to monitor birds and bats activity which will be useful for wildlife biologists in developing mitigation techniques to minimize impact of wind turbines on birds and bats. In order to pro...

Wind Energy is considered as the green and free energy. It can be harvested any time wherever there are high winds. One of the concerns with turbine is with birds and bats. There are reports of birds and bats fatalities around wind turbine. One way to investigate this issue is to monitor wind turbine areas. Researchers have used marine radars for t...

A bird and bat monitoring system has been developed that uses marine radar, IR camera and acoustic recorders for wind farm applications. IR video recording is used to mon itor birds and bats activity wh ich will be useful for wildlife biologists in developing mit igation techniques to minimize impact of wind turbines on birds and bats. The goal is...

There are many reports of bird and bat mortality in vicinity of wind turbines [1]. It is important to quantify numbers and species of birds and bats in a given area which is targeted for wind farm development. It is also necessary to assess the behavior of birds and bats in wind farm areas. Acoustic monitoring techniques have been developed in this...

Interaction of avian with turbines has become an important public policy issue, so identification and quantification of avian at turbine sites is crucial.

Considerable efforts have been made to investigate how homing pigeons (Columba livia f. domestica) are able to return to their loft from distant, unfamiliar sites while the mechanisms underlying navigation in familiar territory have received less attention. With the recent advent of global positioning system (GPS) data loggers small enough to be ca...

There are reports that large number of bat fatalities occur near wind turbines. Acoustic characteristics can be employed for bat call recognition to better understand the effects of turbines on different bat species. Acoustic features of bat echolocation calls are extracted based on three different techniques: Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT), M...

This paper presents a method for target detection and tracking of IR images in the application of avian surveillance. As there are many reports of avian mortality due to collision with turbine blades, the detection and tracking of birds at turbine sites is an important issue. In this work, three different background subtraction techniques are first...

Acoustic monitoring of birds in the vicinity of wind turbines is becoming an important public policy issue. Acoustic monitoring involves preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. A novel Spectrogram-based Image Frequency Statistics (SIFS) feature extraction algorithm has been developed. Features extracted from proposed algorithms were t...

An Evolutionary Neural Network (ENN) is developed to identify bats by their vocalization characteristics. This is in an effort to identify local bat species as a large number of bat fatalities near wind turbines have been reported. ENN is based on the Genetic Algorithm, which can be used for optimization of the weight selection of the neural networ...

A radar and IR based avian monitoring system for an offshore wind turbine application has been designed. The avian monitoring system is capable of capturing radar and IR data. The data is synchronized and sent to a remote computer via 3G system. The IR camera needs to be synchronized with the radar view from a remote location. The system was constr...

The extent to which a species has declined within its historical range is commonly used as an important criterion in categorizing the conservation status of wild populations. The greater prairie chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) has been extirpated from much of the area it once inhabited. However, within a large part of this area the species is not cons...

Numerous bird species have their annual behavioral cycles punctuated twice each year by often dramatic migrations of thousands of kilometers. The habit of migration is a conspicuous component of avian life history and has served as a selective force shaping the evolution of migratory species, and of particular relevance, the evolution of a brain or...