Estimating the impact of airport wildlife hazards management on realized wildlife strike risk.

Autor: Altringer L; US Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services, National Wildlife Research Center, Fort Collins, 80521, CO, USA. Levi.Altringer@usda.gov., Begier MJ; US Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services, Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, Washington, 20250, DC, USA., Washburn JE; US Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services, Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, Sandusky, 44870, OH, USA., Shwiff SA; US Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services, National Wildlife Research Center, Fort Collins, 80521, CO, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Scientific reports [Sci Rep] 2024 Nov 22; Vol. 14 (1), pp. 29018. Date of Electronic Publication: 2024 Nov 22.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-79946-3
Abstrakt: Collisions between wildlife and aircraft, commonly referred to as wildlife strikes or bird strikes, are rare events that pose considerable safety and economic risks to the aviation industry. Given the potentially dramatic consequences of such events, airports scheduled for passenger service are required to conduct wildlife hazard assessments and implement wildlife hazard management plans for the purpose of mitigating wildlife strike risk. The evaluation of such management, however, is complicated by imperfect reporting that mediates the relationship between realized wildlife strike risk and wildlife strike metrics. In this paper, we shed light on such phenomena by investigating the staggered adoption of a federal wildlife hazards management program at joint-use airports across the contiguous United States. This research design allowed us to exploit variation in both management presence across airports, over time as well as variation in the quality of wildlife strike reporting within airports. As hypothesized, we found that wildlife hazards management intervention has a significant impact on the quality of reporting, as evidenced by a substantial increase in the number of civil strikes reported over the management period. Where pre-existing reporting mechanisms were more robust, however, we found that wildlife hazards management had a significant impact on realized wildlife strike risk as evidenced by a decrease in strike-induced economic damages among military aircraft. Overall, we found that the estimated economic benefits of the studied airport wildlife hazards management program were 7 times greater than the costs over the management period. Our results have important implications for the measurement of wildlife strike risk and the management of wildlife hazards at airports, as well as important insights pertaining to the use of observational data for causal inference, particularly in the context of risk management.
Competing Interests: Declarations. Competing interests: M.B. and J.W. are staff of the USDA-APHIS-WS Airport Wildlife Hazards Program, the management program analyzed in this study. L.A. and S.S. are economists employed by the USDA-APHIS-WS National Wildlife Research Center.
(© 2024. This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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