An Animal Migration Forecast Model with Weather Radar and Meteorological Data

Predicting aerial animal migration is of great significance for biological research, ecological conservation, and agricultural production. The mechanism of animal migration is deeply coupled with spatiotemporal and meteorological factors. However, the existing large-scale prediction models using weather radar isolate the spatiotemporal characteristics and the meteorological factors. Additionally, their long-term prediction capabilities are limited, posing challenges in accurately forecasting long-term migration patterns to support applications, such as ecological warnings. This article introduces an aerial migration prediction neural network model combining multiple meteorological factors with weather radar data while expanding the horizon of the migration forecast to the scale of 7 days. Differentiated feature extraction methods are applied to different meteorological factors in the network. The transfer characteristics of the wind field in 2-D space are used to construct a dynamic migration model. The scalar meteorological data are encoded by entity embedding to perform feature fusion with the dynamic branch, collectively forming the forecast model that outputs future migration intensity. We validate the effectiveness of our model China weather radar network real data and reanalysis data, accurately forecasting migratory biomass within China for a horizon of up to 7 days. Moreover, our model is compared with two existing prediction models, demonstrating a maximum improvement of 14.00% in the coefficient of determination (R2) in long-term forecast, and the visualized results highlight the predictive effectiveness for the spring and autumn seasons. In future applications, more meteorological factors should be considered and radar data from more stations should be collected to enhance the dataset.