How can we identify specific bird species as they undertake their annual migrations? In the U.S., scientists have long relied on weather radar data to track flocks of birds migrating across the country. But that came with a caveat: the birds appeared as blobs on the radar, much like dark clouds. They couldn’t tell what species of birds they were looking at. A new tool is helping scientists and conservationists bridge this gap. BirdFlow combines citizen science observations with weather data and artificial intelligence technology to help scientists detect specific species and predict their migration routes. Two studies published in the journals Global Ecology and Biogeography and Movement Ecology describe how BirdFlow can distinguish between species that are migrating across North America. The tool was developed as a collaboration between Cornell University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Let’s say we want to track Wilson’s warbler that winters in Alaska,” Yuting Deng, a co-author on both studies and postdoctoral researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, told Mongabay in a video interview. “Where exactly do they go? Do the eastern and western populations have similar migration timing? What routes are they taking? That’s where BirdFlow comes in.” Knowing which bird species are migrating where is critical for several reasons. For one, without being able to distinguish individual species, scientists can’t tell when and where a threatened species might be moving. The data are also useful for aviation managers, who would want to track larger birds that…This article was originally published on Mongabay