8–9 Sept 2026
Europe/Berlin timezone

Why are some birds more window collision-prone than others?

Not scheduled
20m
Poster Complexity

Speaker

David Tan (iDiv)

Description

Although more than 1,800 bird species worldwide are known to collide with windows, some species appear to be more susceptible to collisions than others. These “super-colliders” are distributed across the bird tree of life, but tend to cluster within a small subset of families such as Pigeons, Wood Warblers, Pittas, and New World Sparrows. To better understand why some species are more collision-prone than others, we conducted a meta-analysis using a large citizen/community science dataset of bird-window collision observations, filtered to exclude regions with low detection rates, to assess the correlation between collision frequency and avian life history traits. We additionally ran family-specific analyses to account for the fact that the drivers of bird collisions likely differ between different bird families. We extended our models to predict the likely collision risk of species from under-sampled parts of the world such as Australia and the Middle East. The results of our models allow us to identify regions where super-colliding species may be especially abundant and therefore in need of collision mitigation solutions.

Status Group Postdoctoral Researcher

Authors

David Tan (iDiv) Marten Winter (iDiv / UL) Martin Quaas Susanne Fritz (Friedrich Schiller University Jena / iDiv / Senckenberg Institute for Plant Form and Function)

Presentation materials

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