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Fireworks

Preface

Abstract

Fireworks are important elements of celebrations globally, but little is known about their effects on wildlife. The synchronized and extraordinary use of fireworks on New Year’s Eve triggers strong flight responses in birds. We used weather radar and systematic bird counts to quantify how flight responses differed across habitats and corresponding bird communities, and determined the distance-dependence of this relationship. On average, approximately 1000 times as many birds were in flight on New Year’s Eve than on other nights. We found that fireworks-related disturbance decreased with distance, most strongly in the first five kilometers, but overall flight activity remained elevated tenfold at distances up to about 10 km. Communities of large-bodied species displayed a stronger response than communities of small-bodied species. Given the pervasive nature of this disturbance, the establishment of large fireworks-free zones or centralizing fireworks within urban centers could help to mitigate their effects on birds. Conservation action should prioritize avian communities with the most disturbance-prone, large-bodied bird species.

Authors

Bart Hoekstra1, Willem Bouten1, Adriaan Dokter1,2, Hans van Gasteren1,3, Chris van Turnhout4,5, Bart Kranstauber1, Emiel van Loon1, Hidde Leijnse6,7, Judy Shamoun-Baranes1

1 Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 94240, 1090 GE Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2 Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States of America
3 Royal Netherlands Air Force, P.O Box 8762, 4820 BB Breda, The Netherlands
4 Sovon Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology, P.O. Box 6521, 6503 GA Nijmegen, The Netherlands
5 Department of Animal Ecology & Physiology, Institute for Biological and Environmental Sciences (RIBES), Radboud University, P.O. Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands
6 R&D Observations and Data Technology, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, The Netherlands
7 Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management Group, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Video

Disturbance of birds from NYE fireworks measured by Dutch weather radars from Bart Hoekstra on Vimeo.

The two weather radars detect the mass take-off of birds following the lighting of fireworks just after midnight on January 1st, 2018. In the study area (surrounded by the red arcs), no less than 384,000 birds immediately flee from fireworks.

How to use this document

Run interactively

All RMarkdown notebook files should be run successively in order of the numbering, starting with 01.Selecting-take-off-moments.Rmd.

Knit it

Use the following line in the console or click Build Book in RStudio.

bookdown::render_book(input = "index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::bs4_book", clean = TRUE)

Full-reproduction mode

In the spirit of reproducibility, the entire analysis can theoretically be reproduced at the push of a button. To facilitate faster reproduction, some code chunks are only run when full reproduction mode is switched on. This can be done by setting the R variable full_repro to TRUE in build_bookdown.R.