India, Jan. 31 -- We've studied birds for centuries, but few have focused on skies as a habitat, and even those have done so sporadically (during storms or in the aftermath of volcanoes, for instance). Then, in 2008, an American bat biologist definitively flipped the perspective, urging scientists to study the aerosphere and its impact as a complex ecosystem teeming with life.

Thomas Kunz's 2008 paper (published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology) coined the term "aeroecology", and defined it as the study and modelling of the "aerosphere". This is a field of study that sits at the intersection of atmospheric science, ecology and engineering, with research conducted via thermal imaging, radar and other sensors.

Key aims i...