This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for fiscal year 2003. The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce.
The research and training plan is entitled "Predicting patterns of avian habitat use and flight behavior during migration using radar and land use databases." This project taps existing weather radar and land cover databases and applies computer-intensive, spatially explicit, individual-based modeling to statistically converge on landbird migratory behaviors that reveal fine scale habitat use patterns important to avian conservation. The model iteratively hunts through a multi-dimensional parameter space seeking to minimize differences between expected (model) and observed (radar) migratory patterns.
