Radar A Useful Remote Tool in Biodiversity Research, Habitat Quality Assessment, Pest Control and Pollution Surveillance

Ecologists, conservationists and institutions working on pest controls or on monitoring and persecuting environmental pollutions but also hydrologists, geologists, oceanographers and others use a broad variety of modern remote sensing techniques for their daily work, including various radar applications [1-3]. Radar is an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging which essentially means the transmission of electromagnetic waves and the reception of their echoes to retrieve information about the target [4-6]. From the 1920s on, radar was initially developed as a tool for military purposes to detect aircraft and ships. Later, it became obvious that radar can also be usefully applied to non-military objectives such as meteorological observations and weather forecasts [5] as well as aerial movements of birds, bats and insects [4,6,7]. An amazing variety of radars was applied in aeroecology [6-8], biological conservation [9] but also in insect pest control [6,10] and other areas. Namely, with the continent-wide availability of weather radar data [8,11], a real renaissance of radar in aeroecology started in the last decade.