Research and conservation efforts have mostly focused on protecting breeding habitats or wintering grounds and only rarely on stopover habitats used by birds during migration ( Hutto, 2000 Marra et al., 2015 Becciu et al., 2019) although migration is the period when the risk of mortality is the highest ( Sillett and Holmes, 2002 Newton, 2006). Migratory birds have been found to steeply decline in recent decades ( Berthold et al., 1998 Sokolov et al., 2001 Sanderson et al., 2006 Rosenberg et al., 2019). Our findings substantially advance the understanding of bird migration ecology near ecological barriers and facilitate informed conservation efforts in a highly populated region by identifying a few high-priority stopover areas of migrating birds. Autumn migrants also selected sites located close to water sources. Notably, artificial light at night strongly correlated with high densities of migrants, especially in the autumn. Bird distributions were primarily associated with broad-scale geographic and anthropogenic factors rather than individual fine-scale habitat types. Boosted Regression Tree models revealed that bird distributions differed between the seasons, with higher densities in the desert and its edge, as well as inland from the sea, during spring and a predominantly coastal distribution in the autumn. Using low elevation scans of three weather radars covering 81,343 km 2, we quantified large-scale bird departure patterns during spring and autumn (2014–2018) in between two major ecological barriers, the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea. Yet, our knowledge of bird stopover distributions and their mechanisms near wide ecological barriers is limited. Stopping-over is critical for migrating birds.
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