Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA; Division of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA; Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139, USA.
Integr Comp Biol. 2008 Jul;48(1):85-98. doi: 10.1093/icb/icn054. Epub 2008 Jun 18.
The physical environment of the aerosphere is both complex and dynamic, and poses many challenges to the locomotor systems of the three extant evolutionary lineages of flying animals. Many features of the aerosphere, operating over spatial and temporal scales of many orders of magnitude, have the potential to be important influences on animal flight, and much as marine ecologists have studied the relationship between physical oceanography and swimming locomotion, a subfield of aeroecology can focus attention on the ways the biology of flight is influenced by these characteristics. Airflows are altered and modulated by motion over and around natural and human-engineered structures, and both vortical flow structures and turbulence are introduced to the aerial environment by technologies such as aircraft and wind farms. Diverse aspects of the biology of flight may be better understood with reference to an aeroecological approach, particularly the mechanics and energetics of flight, the sensing of aerial flows, and the motor control of flight. Moreover, not only does the abiotic world influence the aerospheric conditions in which animals fly, but flying animals also, in turn, change the flow environment in their immediate vicinity, which can include the air through which other animals fly, particularly when animals fly in groups. Flight biologists can offer considerable insight into the ecology of the aerial world, and an aeroecological approach holds great promise for stimulating and enriching the study of the biology of flight.
大气层的物理环境既复杂又动态，对现存的三种飞行动物进化谱系的运动系统构成了许多挑战。大气层的许多特征，作用于许多数量级的时空尺度上，有可能对动物飞行产生重要影响，就像海洋生态学家研究物理海洋学与游泳运动之间的关系一样，航空生态学的一个分支可以关注生物学飞行受到这些特征影响的方式。空气流动在自然和人为结构上及其周围的运动会发生改变和调节，而飞机和风力发电场等技术会将涡旋流结构和湍流引入到空中环境中。通过航空生态学方法，特别是飞行的力学和能量学、对空气流动的感知以及飞行的运动控制，可以更好地理解飞行生物学的各个方面。此外，不仅生物界会影响动物飞行所处的大气层条件，而且飞行动物也会反过来改变其附近的流场环境，这可能包括其他动物飞行所经过的空气，特别是当动物成群飞行时。飞行生物学家可以为空中世界的生态学提供重要的见解，航空生态学方法对于激发和丰富飞行生物学的研究具有很大的潜力。
