Due to essential maintenance works on the servers at UKCEH, it may be that the BWARS website will be unavailable from 3pm on Friday 11 November through to 8.30am on Monday 14 November.
The BWARS website is back on its usual url of https://www.bwars.com/
Sorry that the site has been down for the last few days. We have had a problem with the domain BWARS.com and this is unlikely to be fully resolved for several more days. In the meantime the site is available via the alternate temporary domain BWARS.uk. It is possible that some links might not work but access to species profile pages seem to be working. Mike Fox 2022-09-07
Meeting to be held via Zoom hosted by Tanyptera Trust
The event is free to members, but you are asked to register in advance by email to the Membership Secretary, Clare Boyes (address on BWARS website Contacts page, or in BWARS Newsletter) by Weds 14th Sept. An email with link will be sent to attendees a few days prior to the event.
Welcome
The Committee gives notice of a proposed change to the BWARS Constitution (also notified in Spring 2022 Newsletter). This will be put to members at the AGM on 18th September 2022. Any comments by email or letter must reach the Chair, Louise Hislop, by 1st September to be considered. A copy of the full Constitution is available to members on application to the Secretary, Clare Boyes.
Section 7, Conduct of an AGM and Elections, an additional clause to be added to define quoracy at an AGM:
Programme to follow
You can find and download a zip file of all BWARS records at 10km resolution here. It has just been updated.
Research papers and other publications using BWARS data
BWARS AGM and Members’ Day took place on Sunday 24th October 2021 from 10:00 am
Meeting was held over Zoom
There will be the opportunity to ask short questions via the Chat function on Zoom.
Voting will take place ‘en bloc’ at the end of each section, via Zoom poll. The poll question will read: ‘On the motion before us, do you agree?’ and the options will be ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘abstain’.
Flying Ant Days - please enter your observations here Enter data page
Scientists from the University of Leeds are looking for assistence in collecting data on where and when "flying ant days occur". Please help by completing an online form at the link above. You can read more about this BioDAR Project to the right.
What is the difference between an insect and a raindrop?
Weather radars are constantly collecting information about rain, but in doing so a lot of other data is collected too - including data relating to insects. Evidence concerning worldwide insect declines is growing, and weather radar data represents a new way of monitoring what insects are doing over large spatial scales. This is what we at the BioDAR project are interested in - creating an openly accessible “weather map” of aerial insect activity across the UK.
The BioDAR Project was conceived by a group of biologists and radar scientists at the University of Leeds. The project was designed to use a mixture of machine learning, field observations, and 3D modelling to determine the extent of the ecological information that can be extracted from weather radar data. Like many of us, the pandemic disrupted our lives and workflow; it put our fieldwork and in-situ data collection on hold and we had to think of different ways to help validate some of our research questions, so we turned to mass swarming events and citizen science.
Each year in the UK we witness “flying ant day” - several days across each summer where males and new queens from species like the black garden ant (Lasius niger) take to the air to mate and disperse in search of new nesting sites. We are using these swarming events to see if this massive increase in insect activity can be detected by our weather radar.
But to do this we need your help!
We have created a quick and easy web survey that you can fill in to help us track flying ant swarms across the UK. So if you see flying ants this year, please report your sightings - we’d really appreciate it! The survey be found here: https://forms.gle/P3Tof3os6idBCYMA6, or by scanning the QR code below, and takes less than a minute to fill in.
If we are able to reliably detect flying ant swarm activity using weather radars, this will allow us to explore in-depth the environmental conditions that trigger swarming; not only at ground level, but also at higher altitudes. It will also give us a peek into how spatially restricted (or not) their dispersal is, and whether this differs across different landscapes. And finally, it will enable us to map this phenomenon over time, and investigate how environmental change affects flying ant activity.
If you have any questions concerning BioDAR or our flying ant project, please contact Prof. Elizabeth Duncan at e.j.duncan@leeds.ac.uk or Tom Dally at t.m.dally@leeds.ac.uk
