Can ecological forecasting lead to convergence on sustainable lighting policies?

The overuse and expansion of artificial light at night (ALAN) has emerged from complex social, economic, and political factors, making it a societal problem that negatively impacts wildlife and people. We propose that a convergence research approach combining ecological forecasting with community engagement and public policy is needed to address this diverse societal problem. To begin this convergence research approach, we hosted a workshop to strengthen connections among key biodiversity‐oriented ALAN stakeholders and to better understand how stakeholder groups function across the United States through facilitated discussions. We have prioritized the input of stakeholders early in our research design by including them in the formulation of a national survey on public perceptions surrounding ALAN and received their input on existing ecological forecasting tools to improve those research products for their future use.


| INTRODUCTION: ALAN AS A SOCIETAL PROBLEM
The intensity and distribution of artificial lights at night (ALAN) are growing rapidly (Kyba et al., 2017) with almost half of the United States experiencing significantly photopolluted nights (Falchi et al., 2016). Additionally, most of the world's human population (55%) already lives in urban areas and that percentage is projected to grow to 68% by 2050(U.N. DESA, 2018. Emerging from complex social, economic, and political factors (Gaston et al., 2015), the current state of ALAN is linked to the benefits of urban attractiveness, perceived safety, and economic opportunity-for these reasons, lighting strategies and policies are of intense interest to politicians, municipal governments, city planners, businesses, architects, civil engineers, and economists (Boyce, 2019). Urban zones in particular are experiencing increased human-health (Bonmati-Carrion et al., 2014;Cho et al., 2015) and ecological (Davies & Smyth, 2018;Sanders et al., 2021;Svechkina et al., 2020) consequences from ALAN. It is also clear that existing policy systems may not currently be able to address growth in ALAN or mitigate its nonsustainable impacts (Schroer et al., 2020).
Paradoxically, as lighting becomes more efficient (e.g., the emergence of light-emitting diodes, LEDs), so does the severity and scope of ALAN's negative impacts (Schulte-Römer et al., 2019) documented in a growing number of research studies on ALAN and light pollution in recent years . Citizen science data have revealed that globally, sky glow from artificial light has increased at a rate higher than was previously known through satellite data, showing that the brightness of the sky has increased at up to 10% per year (Kyba et al., 2023). Unequivocally, there are considerable ecological considerations of ALAN; roughly 60% (n = 638,000) of invertebrate and 30% (n = 17,000) of vertebrate species have nocturnal phases of their life cycle (Hölker et al., 2010). In addition, at least 446,000 species (443,000 of lepidoptera and coleoptera combined and 3000 birds and bats combined) are known to fly at night (Hölker et al., 2010).
Consistently, studies show that ALAN disrupts animal movement and orientation patterns (Svechkina et al., 2020), of which the acute and dramatic impact on nocturnally migrating birds is particularly well documented Van Doren et al., 2021;Van Doren et al., 2017). Annually, nearly a billion birds die in collisions with buildings, many of these are migrant birds flying at night that are attracted to buildings by ALAN. Both bird collisions with buildings and widespread disruption of animal orientation are growing conservation problems-and increasingly public relations problems for cities as well (Horton et al., 2019). This combination makes a large fraction of biodiversity particularly susceptible to disruption of the nocturnal environment to which they are highly adapted through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Compounding this issue, the geographic area impacted by ALAN extends well beyond built environments with lights permeating far beyond urban centers, at times hundreds of kilometers (Falchi et al., 2016).

| A DIVERSE PROBLEM REQUIRES A DIVERSE SOLUTION
The growth of ALAN and its consequences is a complex societal and conservation problem that will be incredibly difficult to solve (DeFries & Nagendra, 2017). Because people have a natural affinity for birds and bird migration, the impact of ALAN on birds is emerging as a flagship sustainability issue for diverse communities interested in minimizing the ecological impacts of ALAN. Light pollution was even the theme of 2022's World Migratory Bird Day and while solutions may seem simple (i.e., dim the lights), like many ecological problems, motivating and coordinating broad behavioral changes from people requires creative collaboration to evoke changes in policy, education, and advocacy.
For these reasons, we advocate for a convergence research approach at the intersection of ecology and social science through combining ecological forecasting with public policy and community engagement to address this diverse societal problem. For example, having ecological forecasts that predict the intensity of bird migration can inform a more targeted conservation strategy for turning off lights at night to reduce bird mortality from disorientation and collisions with human infrastructure . This targeted strategy presents a more efficient and dynamic way of drawing attention to this problem-particularly when society's attention can wane quickly with blanket seasonal statements of "dim the lights". However, forecasts alone will not build swift and lasting societal change. Integration of insights from social science and public policy theory provides a framework for quantifying the impact of forecasting on the broader public and guiding better communication of research products in the context of coalitional dynamics that are critical to the formulation of broadly acceptable and sustainable public policies (Jenkins-Smith et al., 2014;Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993). Within the convergence research framework, evolving advocacy coalitions represent intellectual groupings of shared values, perspectives, and attitudes that emerge from interaction and coordination to contribute to shaping policies within the subsystem in question, ALAN in our case. We can use this approach to characterize the evolving coalitions of actors that seek to address their concerns about ALAN, and to identify the relevant institutions and venues within which the coalitions seek to shape the direction of policy (Jenkins-Smith et al., 2018;Nohrstedt & Olofsson, 2016). To accomplish this, research products need to identify key ALAN stakeholders within the advocacy coalitions and obtain their help with the co-design and implementation of research products from the initial stages.

| GETTING TO KNOW THE PROBLEM FROM STAKEHOLDERS' PERSPECTIVE
To tackle this problem through the convergence of ecological, social, and political science lenses, we kicked-off this approach by hosting a Bird Migration and Light Pollution Workshop to partner with ALAN stakeholders in Fort Collins, Colorado at Colorado State University on March 14-15, 2022. We gathered representatives of a biodiversity-oriented coalition that are concerned about collisions of migratory birds with built infrastructure, including the America Bird Conservancy, Audubon Rockies, Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Fort Collins Audubon, Georgia Audubon, Houston Audubon, National Audubon, New York City Audubon. We also included groups dedicated to preserving "dark skies" such as The Colorado Chapter of the International Dark-Sky Association and the National Park Service's Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division. The overall goal and motivation of this workshop were to engage with key participants in this advocacy coalition network and to better understand how groups function across the United States. Subsequent stages of the research will shift our focus to understanding the broader population of stakeholders who represent a set of diverse and competing interests not only focused on migratory bird conservation and preservation of the night sky but also public safety, human health, and economic development, each with the potential to influence policies related to ALAN. Understanding their concerns and interests will be essential to identification of policy options that are at least minimally acceptable to members of both the pro-ALAN and anti-ALAN restriction communities.
Critically, the workshop served to engage stakeholders in co-design of our convergence research approach-in particular, stakeholders helped formulate questions and topics for a national survey to understand public perceptions surrounding ALAN and migration and provided feedback on how they use and distribute existing ecological forecasting tools like BirdCast through public seminars, social media, or LISTSERVS (Figure 1). A primary goal of this workshop was to understand how this group of stakeholders use the existing ecological data available on bird migration and ALAN. Through this workshop, we focused on how we can help make data products more impactful and useful for stakeholders, whether that be by incorporating more data or adapting visualizations. Within ecological forecasting, there is an assumption that improved forecasting will increase benefits (i.e., reduced bird mortality) and reduce costs (i.e., effort spent communicating ecological problem)-we seek to test whether this assumption is valid moving forward. Our ability to forecast times and places of intense bird migration has advanced rapidly in the past decade (Van Doren & Horton, 2018) and will continue to build upon our forecasting innovations in this area and improve technical aspects of forecasting times and places with high risk of migration disorientation and collisions between birds and infrastructure.
To set the seeds for these discussions, we invited experts from each organization to share how they advocate for changes in light pollution and bird migration through engagement, data collection, and policy outreach. Through further facilitated discussions at the workshop, common challenges shared by stakeholders emerged. One dominant theme centered on public interest or knowledge around bird migration and a lack of awareness surrounding the negative effects of light pollution. Simply put, qualitatively the public is not broadly aware that birds migrate at night-a clear barrier that challenges the linkage between light pollution and its threat to migratory birds. It was noted that there are straightforward solutions that could be immediately implemented to erase or reduce the negative impacts of light pollution. They include but are not limited to the following: reducing the amount of non-necessary indoor and outdoor lighting, using down shielding on lights when possible, having timers and motion sensors on lighting, and using wildlife-friendly lighting colors if intensity cannot be reduced (e.g., warmer colored lights closer to 1000 Kelvin than cooler colored lights closer to 10,000 Kelvin ). However, knowledge and awareness are clear barriers preventing these solutions from being implemented, leading to more complex nuances such as incentives for reduced light pollution, effective legislation, and broadscale participation in lights-out campaigns with greater appreciation for both darkness and birds.
Given the above challenges, how do we address these barriers through convergence? Through the integration of ecology, political science, public policy theory, and the engagement of stakeholders, we can generate effective strategies to understand this societal problem.

| CONCLUSION: A PATH TOWARD CONVERGENCE
The first step of our convergence research approach occurred through our meeting with members of the coalition favoring restrictions on ALAN (Bird Migration and Light Pollution Workshop) to begin our partnership with ALAN stakeholders (Figure 2). This coalition meeting provided input for our two main research products: (1) Improved Ecological Forecasts to improve our ability to forecast when and where birds migrate to help reduce bird collisions and mortality, and (2) A National Survey to measure the general public's baseline attitudes toward bird migration and ALAN, and how willing they are to address this societal problem. The forecasting products and survey results will allow us to continue to engage directly with the public to provide novel targeted messaging experiments to curb ALAN. Those data will in turn allow us to measure shifts in levels of ALAN and monitor bird-building collisions in future years. With sustained engagement with our advocacy stakeholders, we can stay indirectly engaged with the communities they have built and fostered while we continue to improve our forecasting tools to better suit their needs.
In the future, the outcomes of these studies will contribute to a general understanding of how communities and researchers can engage with complex societal and environmental problems more broadly to drive transformations toward sustainability. Growing environmental threats compel us to discover tractable mechanisms for creating behavioral change toward sustainable practices. If we can begin to understand these change pathways, we can engage with future societal issues before polarization makes progress ineffective, expensive, or seemingly impossible. To achieve this result, research communities must work in new and deeply transdisciplinary channels, cutting across boundaries that traditionally silo research sectors.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
All authors worked to generate ideas and draft this manuscript.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation's Growing Convergence Research program (GCR-2123404 and GCR-2123405). We would like to thank all the attendees of our workshop for their time, honest F I G U R E 2 Conceptual map of our convergence research plan beginning with our coalition workshop, national survey, and technology innovation (left) to co-create (with advocacy coalitions) experimental messaging campaigns (middle) while measuring environmental, biological, and cultural outcomes in future years (right). discussions, and engaged input. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for improving this manuscript.

FUNDING INFORMATION
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation's Growing Convergence Research program (GCR-2123404 & GCR-2123405).

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
All authors declare no conflict of interest.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data sharing not applicableno new data generated.