To be or not to be – Deterministic factors in deductive thermal modeling for predicting vulture flight Available to Purchase

Modeling biological processes as flight in vultures is vital either for fundamental knowledge or their conservation. Vultures are scavenger birds that rely heavily on thermals for their flight. Thermals are columns of rising air formed over a heated surface due to atmospheric convection. Therefore, it is expected that a well-lit surface with high thermal capacity in regions with uneven heating and direct solar radiation is the perfect condition for thermals. To understand the flight formation in griffon vultures a weighted hierarchical model for each of the GIS variables and their value subsets should be built. GPS data of the flight of 19 griffon vultures were used to support the selection of variables, important to building such a model. The main model parameters selected were the topography of the terrain, land cover, and climatic variables. High-resolution GIS layers provided the needed variables for the topography (altitude, terrain ruggedness, slope, aspect), land cover type (asphalt, concrete, bare rocks, sand, dry soil, short-grass vegetation, and others), and climatic variables (ground temperature, air temperature, atmospheric pressure, and average precipitation. To support the model physical fundamentals for the formation of thermals were used. Comparing the theoretical (model-based) and empirical (vulture GPS data) results provide a set of factors that can be used reliably for deductive GIS modeling of the thermals.