Minimizing Wildlife and Wind Energy Conflicts Through Species Distribution Models

The wind industry has been dedicated to proactively addressing impacts to wildlife and their habitats. Despite best intentions, however, modest impacts to wildlife can and have occurred at operational wind facilities.... [ view full abstract ]

The wind industry has been dedicated to proactively addressing impacts to wildlife and their habitats. Despite best intentions, however, modest impacts to wildlife can and have occurred at operational wind facilities. Exploring and reducing these impacts prior to development is paramount, but the distribution and timing of species occurrence may be driven by landscape factors that occur well beyond the borders of a wind facility. Identifying these underlying drivers undoubtedly has strong implications for wildlife conservation, but may also provide the wind industry a means to reduce wildlife conflicts through additional avoidance, prior to development. Species distribution models, which are spatially-explicit models that predict the occurrence or abundance of a species or groups of species throughout a geographic extent, are increasingly being used to strategically target conservation resources by state and federal wildlife agencies. Alternatively, these same models can be used either individually, or combined with additional decision support tools, to identify specific areas predicted to have the least impacts to species of concern. Using simulated data, we constructed a species distribution model and demonstrated various applications used to reduce impacts to wildlife. We further demonstrate how a species distribution model can be combined with other geographic information system (GIS) layers commonly used during wind siting to formulate a decision support tool that can aid in establishing the layout for a wind facility.