Data from: Aeroecology of a solar eclipse

Light cues elicit strong responses from nearly all forms of life, perhaps most notably as circadian rhythms entrained by periods of daylight and darkness. Atypical periods of darkness, like solar eclipses, provide rare opportunities to study biological responses to light cues. By using a continental scale radar network, we investigated responses of flying animals to the total solar eclipse of 21 August 2017. We quantified the number of biological targets in the atmosphere at 143 weather radar stations across the continental United States to investigate whether the decrease in light and temperature at an atypical time would initiate a response like that observed at sunset, when activity in the atmosphere usually increases. Overall, biological activity decreased in the period leading to totality, followed by a short low-altitude spike of biological activity during totality in some radars. This pattern suggests that cues associated with the eclipse were insufficient to initiate nocturnal activity comparable to that occurring at sunset but sufficient to suppress diurnal activity.VIR during the 2017-08-21 EclipseBiological data from 143 NEXRAD stations, process and extracted in R-package bioRad, showing biological activity in the air surrounding the American Eclipse on 2017-08-21. This file contains the four hours surrounding the time of max eclipse at each site on day of eclipse. Included is NEXRAD site name (site), vertically integrated reflectivity (vir) for each timestamp in UTC (datetime), the time from that timestamp to eclipse in minutes (diff), the maximum amount of obscuration at that site (obscuration) and two obscuration groupings (obs_groups = <80%, 80-95%, 95-99.9%, 100%, obs_groups2 = <80%, 80-95%, 95-100%).eclipse_VIR.csvVIR at sunset 2017-08-21Biological data from 143 NEXRAD stations, process and extracted in R-package bioRad, showing biological activity in the air surrounding sunset on the day of the American Eclipse 2017-08-21. Contains the NEXRAD site name (site), vertically integrated reflectivity (vir) for each timestamp in UTC (datetime), time of sunset in UTC (sunset), the time from that timestamp to sunset in minutes (diff), the maximum amount of obscuration at that site (obscuration) and two obscuration groupings (obs_groups = <80%, 80-95%, 95-99.9%, 100%, obs_groups2 = <80%, 80-95%, 95-100%).eclipse_VIR_sunset.csvVIR on days surrounding the 2017-08-21 eclipseBiological data from 143 NEXRAD stations, process and extracted in R-package bioRad, showing biological activity in the air in the four hours surrounding the time of day of the eclipse on the two previous and two following days (2017-08-19 to 2017-08-23). Contains the NEXRAD site name (site), vertically integrated reflectivity (vir) for each timestamp in UTC (datetime), the time from that timestamp to the time of day of the eclipse in minutes (diff), the maximum amount of obscuration during the eclipse at that site (obscuration) and two obscuration groupings (obs_groups = <80%, 80-95%, 95-99.9%, 100%, obs_groups2 =