Andrew Farnsworth

Visiting Scientist

Expertise

Bird Migration • Aeroecology • Bioacoustics • Radar Ornithology • Climate Change

First and foremost, I study bird migration. And I do this primarily in two ways: by lifting binoculars to watch birds literally move from one place to another, and by taking advantage of incredible and rapid 20th and 21st century technological advances in radar and acoustic remote sensing and machine learning and computational resources.

For the former, I have worked closely with a cadre of Cornell Lab and external collaborators to understand patterns of bird movements by examining observations from a growing and increasingly diverse armada of citizen and community scientists. For the latter, I have mentored elementary students to postdoctoral fellows in ornithological, ecological, and data science disciplines and built academic and stakeholder partnerships to advance our understanding of bird migration patterns.

I also work closely with media relations and outreach to connect this type of science and its interpretations and methods to education, conservation actions, and awareness.

Education

Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University
M.S., Zoology, Clemson University
B.S., Natural Resources, Cornell University

Spark Moment

Aside from myriad experiences as a child that led me to and kept me engaged in birding, the moments that put me on the path to where I am and to where I plan to go? There are two: First as a freshman at Cornell University, on an evening in early October 1991, standing atop Mt Pleasant (near Ithaca, New York) with Bill Evans, I realized just how little I knew about and how much I wanted to know about migration, at once humbled and inspired by the experience of listening to wave after wave of vocal thrushes next to a true expert.

Second, three years out of undergraduate studies in April 1998, at a crossroads of deciding what career path and life history to choose, watching a migration ecology legend, Dr. Sidney Gauthreaux, speak in St Louis on the power and potential of radar ornithology, I had the epiphany of what would be my future to study migration at scales of space and time that, at the time, I could only imagine (but have now realized!).

Inspiration

“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”

Recent Publications

Van Doren, B. M., A. Farnsworth, K. Stone, D. M. Osterhaus, J. Drucker, and G. Van Horn (2023). Nighthawk : acoustic monitoring of nocturnal bird migration in the Americas. Ecology.
Loss, S. R., B. V. Li, L. C. Horn, M. R. Mesure, L. Zhu, T. G. Brys, A. M. Dokter, J. A. Elmore, R. E. Gibbons, T. Z. Homayoun, K. G. Horton, et al. (2023). Citizen science to address the global issue of bird–window collisions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 21:418–427.
Van Doren, B. M., V. Lostanlen, A. Cramer, J. Salamon, A. Dokter, S. Kelling, J. P. Bello, and A. Farnsworth (2023). Automated acoustic monitoring captures timing and intensity of bird migration. Journal of Applied Ecology 60:433–444.
Lostanlen, V., A. Cramer, J. Salamon, A. Farnsworth, B. M. Van Doren, S. Kelling, and J. P. Bello (2022). BirdVox: Machine listening for bird migration monitoring. [Online.] Available at
Robinson, O. J., J. B. Socolar, E. F. Stuber, T. Auer, A. J. Berryman, P. H. Boersch-Supan, D. J. Brightsmith, A. H. Burbidge, S. H. M. Butchart, C. L. Davis, A. M. Dokter, et al. (2022). Extreme uncertainty and unquantifiable bias do not inform population sizes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119:e2113862119.
La Sorte, F. A., A. Johnston, A. D. Rodewald, D. Fink, A. Farnsworth, B. M. Van Doren, T. Auer, and M. Strimas‐Mackey (2022). The role of artificial light at night and road density in predicting the seasonal occurrence of nocturnally migrating birds. Diversity and Distributions 28:992–1009.
Shamoun-Baranes, J., S. Bauer, J. W. Chapman, P. Desmet, A. M. Dokter, A. Farnsworth, H. van Gasteren, B. Haest, J. Koistinen, B. Kranstauber, F. Liechti, et al. (2022). Meteorological data policies needed to support biodiversity monitoring with weather radar. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 103:E1234–E1242.
Clipp, H. L., J. J. Buler, J. A. Smolinsky, K. G. Horton, A. Farnsworth, and E. B. Cohen (2021). Winds aloft over three water bodies influence spring stopover distributions of migrating birds along the Gulf of Mexico coast. Ornithology 138:ukab051.
Nilsson, C., F. A. La Sorte, A. Dokter, K. Horton, B. M. Van Doren, J. J. Kolodzinski, J. Shamoun‐Baranes, and A. Farnsworth (2021). Bird strikes at commercial airports explained by citizen science and weather radar data. Journal of Applied Ecology 58:2029–2039.
Van Doren, B. M., D. E. Willard, M. Hennen, K. G. Horton, E. F. Stuber, D. Sheldon, A. H. Sivakumar, J. Wang, A. Farnsworth, and B. M. Winger (2021). Drivers of fatal bird collisions in an urban center. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118:e2101666118.
Shamoun-Baranes, J., S. Bauer, J. W. Chapman, P. Desmet, A. M. Dokter, A. Farnsworth, B. Haest, J. Koistinen, B. Kranstauber, F. Liechti, T. H. E. Mason, et al. (2021). Weather radars' role in biodiversity monitoring. Science 372:248–248.
Horton, K. G., B. M. Van Doren, H. J. Albers, A. Farnsworth, and D. Sheldon (2021). Near‐term ecological forecasting for dynamic aeroconservation of migratory birds. Conservation Biology. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13740
Elmore, J. A., C. S. Riding, K. G. Horton, T. J. O'Connell, A. Farnsworth, and S. R. Loss (2021). Predicting bird‐window collisions with weather radar. Journal of Applied Ecology 58:1593–1601.
Cohen, E. B., K. G. Horton, P. P. Marra, H. L. Clipp, A. Farnsworth, J. A. Smolinsky, D. Sheldon, and J. J. Buler (2021). A place to land: spatiotemporal drivers of stopover habitat use by migrating birds. Ecology Letters 24:38–49.
Clipp, H. L., E. B. Cohen, J. A. Smolinsky, K. G. Horton, A. Farnsworth, and J. J. Buler (2020). Broad-scale weather patterns encountered during flight influence landbird stopover distributions. Remote Sensing 12:565.
Cramer, J., V. Lostanlen, A. Farnsworth, J. Salamon, and J. P. Bello (2020). Chirping up the right tree: Incorporating biological taxonomies into deep bioacoustic classifiers. ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 901–905.
Lostanlen, V., S. Sridhar, B. McFee, A. Farnsworth, and J. P. Bello (2020). Learning the helix topology of musical pitch. ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 11–15.
Horton, K. G., F. A. La Sorte, D. Sheldon, T.-Y. Lin, K. Winner, G. Bernstein, S. Maji, W. M. Hochachka, and A. Farnsworth (2020). Phenology of nocturnal avian migration has shifted at the continental scale. Nature Climate Change 10:63–68.
Diamond, A. W., D. B. McNair, J. C. Ellis, J.-F. Rail, E. S. Whidden, A. W. Kratter, S. J. Courchesne, M. A. Pokras, S. I. Wilhelm, A. Farnsworth, M. J. Iliff, et al. (2020). Two unprecedented auk wrecks in the northwest Atlantic in winter 2012/13. Marine Ornithology 48:185–204.
Lostanlen, V., J. Salamon, A. Farnsworth, S. Kelling, and J. P. Bello (2019). Robust sound event detection in bioacoustic sensor networks. PLoS ONE 14:e0214168.
Newcombe, P. B., C. Nilsson, T.-Y. Lin, K. Winner, G. Bernstein, S. Maji, D. Sheldon, A. Farnsworth, and K. G. Horton (2019). Migratory flight on the Pacific Flyway: Strategies and tendencies of wind drift compensation. Biology Letters 15:1–10.
Gomes, C., T. Dietterich, C. Barrett, J. Conrad, B. Dilkina, S. Ermon, F. Fang, A. Farnsworth, A. Fern, X. Fern, D. Fink, et al. (2019). Computational sustainability: computing for a better world and a sustainable future. Communications of the ACM 62:56–65.
Lin, T., K. Winner, G. Bernstein, A. Mittal, A. M. Dokter, K. G. Horton, C. Nilsson, B. M. Van Doren, A. Farnsworth, F. A. La Sorte, S. Maji, and D. Sheldon (2019). MistNet: Measuring historical bird migration in the US using archived weather radar data and convolutional neural networks. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 10:1908–1922.
Bauer, S., J. Shamoun‐Baranes, C. Nilsson, A. Farnsworth, J. F. Kelly, D. R. Reynolds, A. M. Dokter, J. F. Krauel, L. B. Petterson, K. G. Horton, and J. W. Chapman (2019). The grand challenges of migration ecology that radar aeroecology can help answer. Ecography 42:861–875.
Horton, K. G., C. Nilsson, B. M. Van Doren, F. A. La Sorte, A. M. Dokter, and A. Farnsworth (2019). Bright lights in the big cities: Migratory birds' exposure to artificial light. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 17:209–214.
Horton, K. G., B. M. Van Doren, F. A. La Sorte, E. B. Cohen, H. L. Clipp, J. J. Buler, D. Fink, J. F. Kelly, and A. Farnsworth (2019). Holding steady: Little change in intensity or timing of bird migration over the Gulf of Mexico. Global Change Biology 25:1106–1118.
Lostanlen, V., J. Salamon, M. Cartwright, B. McFee, A. Farnsworth, S. Kelling, and J. P. Bello (2019). Per-channel energy normalization: Why and how. IEEE Signal Processing Letters 26:39–43.
Lostanlen, V., K. Palmer, E. Knight, C. Clark, H. Klinck, A. Farnsworth, T. Wong, J. Cramer, and J. P. Bello (2019). Long-distance detection of bioacoustic events with per-channel energy normalization. https://doi.org/10.33682/ts6e-sn53
Horton, K. G., B. M. Van Doren, F. A. La Sorte, D. Fink, D. Sheldon, A. Farnsworth, and J. F. Kelly (2018). Navigating north: How body mass and winds shape avian flight behaviours across a North American migratory flyway. Ecology Letters 21:1055–1064.
Lisovski, S., H. Schmaljohann, E. S. Bridge, S. Bauer, A. Farnsworth, S. A. Gauthreaux, S. Hahn, M. T. Hallworth, C. M. Hewson, J. F. Kelly, F. Liechti, et al. (2018). Inherent limits of light-level geolocation may lead to over-interpretation. Current biology: CB 28:R99–R100.
Nilsson, C., K. G. Horton, A. M. Dokter, B. M. Van Doren, and A. Farnsworth (2018). Aeroecology of a solar eclipse. Biology Letters 14:20180485.
Dokter, A. M., A. Farnsworth, D. Fink, V. Ruiz-Gutierrez, W. M. Hochachka, F. A. La Sorte, O. J. Robinson, K. V. Rosenberg, and S. Kelling (2018). Seasonal abundance and survival of North America's migratory avifauna determined by weather radar. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2:1603–1609.
Lostanlen, V., J. Salamon, A. Farnsworth, S. Kelling, and J. P. Bello (2018). Birdvox-Full-Night: A dataset and benchmark for avian flight call detection. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, Calgary, AB, pp. 266–270.
Van Doren, B. M., K. G. Horton, A. M. Dokter, H. Klinck, S. B. Elbin, and A. Farnsworth (2017). High-intensity urban light installation dramatically alters nocturnal bird migration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/0.1073/pnas.1708574114
La Sorte, F. A., D. Fink, J. J. Buler, A. Farnsworth, and S. A. Cabrera-Cruz (2017). Seasonal associations with urban light pollution for nocturnally migrating bird populations. Global Change Biology 23:4603–4619.
Sullivan, B. L., T. Phillips, A. A. Dayer, C. L. Wood, A. Farnsworth, M. J. Iliff, I. J. Davies, A. Wiggins, D. Fink, W. M. Hochachka, A. D. Rodewald, et al. (2017). Using open access observational data for conservation action: A case study for birds. Biological Conservation 208:5–14.
Salamon, J., J. P. Bello, A. Farnsworth, and S. Kelling (2017). Fusing shallow and deep learning for bioacoustic bird species classifications. New Orleans, USA, pp. 1–5.
Salamon, J., J. P. Bello, A. Farnsworth, M. Robbins, S. Keen, H. Klinck, and S. Kelling (2016). Towards the automatic classification of avian flight calls for bioacoustic monitoring. PLOS ONE 11:e0166866.
Horton, K. G., B. M. V. Doren, P. M. Stepanian, A. Farnsworth, and J. F. Kelly (2016). Where in the air? Aerial habitat use of nocturnally migrating birds. Biology Letters 12:20160591.
Shamoun-Baranes, J., A. Farnsworth, B. Aelterman, J. A. Alves, K. Azijn, G. Bernstein, S. Branco, P. Desmet, A. M. Dokter, K. Horton, S. Kelling, et al. (2016). Innovative visualizations shed light on avian nocturnal migration. PLOS ONE 11:e0160106.
Van Doren, B. M., K. G. Horton, P. M. Stepanian, D. S. Mizrahi, and A. Farnsworth (2016). Wind drift explains the reoriented morning flights of songbirds. Behavioral Ecology:arw021.
Horton, K. G., B. M. Van Doren, P. M. Stepanian, W. M. Hochachka, A. Farnsworth, and J. F. Kelly (2016). Nocturnally migrating songbirds drift when they can and compensate when they must. Scientific Reports 6:21249.
Horton, K. G., B. M. Van Doren, P. M. Stepanian, A. Farnsworth, and J. F. Kelly (2016). Seasonal differences in landbird migration strategies. The Auk 133:761–769.
Farnsworth, A., B. M. Van Doren, W. M. Hochachka, D. Sheldon, K. Winner, J. Irvine, J. Geevarghese, and S. Kelling (2016). A characterization of autumn nocturnal migration detected by weather surveillance radars in the northeastern USA. Ecological Applications 26:752–770.
La Sorte, F. A., W. M. Hochachka, A. Farnsworth, A. A. Dhondt, and D. Sheldon (2016). The implications of mid-latitude climate extremes for North American migratory bird populations. Ecosphere 7:e01261.
Huang, J.-B., R. Caruana, A. Farnsworth, S. Kelling, and N. Ahuja (2016). Detecting migrating birds at night. Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
La Sorte, F. A., W. M. Hochachka, A. Farnsworth, D. Sheldon, B. M. V. Doren, D. Fink, and S. Kelling (2015). Seasonal changes in the altitudinal distribution of nocturnally migrating birds during autumn migration. Royal Society Open Science 2:150347.
Farnsworth, A., F. A. La Sorte, and M. J. Iliff (2015). Warmer Summers and Drier Winters Correlate with More Winter Vagrant Purple Gallinules (Porphyrio martinicus) in the North Atlantic Region. The Wilson Journal of Ornithology 127:582–593.
La Sorte, F. A., D. Fink, W. M. Hochachka, J. L. Aycrigg, K. V. Rosenberg, A. D. Rodewald, N. E. Bruns, A. Farnsworth, B. L. Sullivan, C. Wood, and S. Kelling (2015). Documenting stewardship responsibilities across the annual cycle for birds on U.S. public lands. Ecological Applications 25:39–51.
Andrew Farnsworth by Lindsay France
Center Avian Population Studies
Projects BirdCast
Email af27@cornell.edu

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Golden-cheeked Warbler by Bryan Calk/Macaulay Library