The Effects of Wildfires on Bird Migration Routes

Summary

Wildfires have been affecting migratory routes of birds. I downloaded two datasets from Kaggle about gull migration and global wildfires. We want to understand the relationship between fire proximity and other variables such as speed, altitude, and direction. The outcome modeled is wildfire proximity, a numeric variable, as a linear function. Birds with higher proximity to fires correlate to have a higher degrees counterclockwise from the east. For each one-degree counterclockwise increase in direction relative to the east, the model predicts that the distance to the nearest wildfire decreases by approximately 0.059 miles with a 95% confidence interval ranging from -0.096 to -0.021.