Conference Agenda

Careful planning for renewable infrastructure is necessary to mitigate significant impacts on animal wildlife, especially when focusing on preventing mortality, habitat loss, and barrier effects. Importantly, evaluating the cumulative effects arising from multiple projects, including powerlines and renewables, is crucial for assessing the overall impacts comprehensively.

Previous methods addressing ecological aspects relevant for impact assessment, such as animal mortality risk and habitat loss, faced limitations including inadequate temporal and spatial resolution and susceptibility to successive bias arising from correction factors. With the advent of the technological revolution, movement ecology has emerged as a critically important field in science. The increased affordability of technology has facilitated the acquisition of larger datasets, more representative of populations, thereby enhancing our understanding of animal ecology and behaviour.

With this presentation, we will explore how movement ecology has been applied to address pressing issues regarding energy projects. We will demonstrate its use in enhancing the understanding of the effects of these infrastructures, such as estimating mortality caused by collisions with power lines and the avoidance behavior next to wind turbines. Additionally, we will highlight its role in supporting mitigation efforts, including the development of high-resolution collision risk maps to predict areas with high hazard risk.

The strategic spatial planning of new renewable energy infrastructures is crucial to prevent potential impacts on wildlife. Best practice usually recommends the development of systematic conservation planning to prevent the establishment of new industries in ecologically significant areas, and to support governments’ licensing frameworks. However, this becomes especially challenging when dealing with species whose home ranges shift seasonally and are not entirely confined within specific boundaries.

Data from animal GPS-tracking studies have high spatial and temporal resolution, providing detailed information about species occurrence throughout the annual cycle. Such data, when integrated with high spatiotemporal resolution environmental data from remote sensing, have the potential for accurately predict species distribution across seasons.

In this presentation, we will showcase the use of high-resolution animal GPS-tracking data and remote sensing environmental data to identify priority areas for species with marked seasonal shifts in their ecological requirements. We use steppe birds in the Iberian Peninsula as an example, as their distribution greatly overlaps with areas of high potential for renewable energy, especially in relation to solar farms. Mapping the fine-scale habitat suitability of steppe birds across their seasonal phenology, provides a crucial tool for mitigating potential conflicts between renewable energy development and wildlife conservation.

Bird mortality through collision or electrocution is expected to rise in the next few decades due to an increasing need for energy infrastructure associated with the transition to renewable energy sources. Hence, the identification of collision high-vulnerability areas and associated mitigation and avoidance strategies is urgently needed to minimize the impacts of a zero-carbon energy society. We use GPS location data from species susceptible to collision within Europe and North Africa to identify where birds are most at risk of colliding with existing energy infrastructure and to determine which environmental variables affect bird flight height and collision risk. The environmental variables used included land use, weather and uplift. Vulnerability to collision was obtained by overlaying model outputs with density of wind turbines and transmission power lines. Sensitive areas were concentrated within important migratory corridors and along coastlines but there were high sensitivity areas scattered across Europe and Northern Africa. We map vulnerability hotspots where building new energy infrastructure should be avoided and where mitigation with existing infrastructure should be prioritised to reduce collision risks.

Understanding the extent of animal mortality, the where and when mortality occurs, is paramount to implement effective conservation actions and secure the persistence of animal populations. Unfortunately, so far our understanding of animal survival (the inverse of mortality) is very limited, even for well-studied species such as vultures. We integrate individual high-resolution GPS tracking data with detailed life-history information to quantify the survival of three European vultures (Griffon, Cinereous and Bearded vulture) across the entire Europe. The study included >1400 vulture individuals across the three species. The survival model accounted for the GPS tag failure and allowed to estimate survival separately for juvenile, immature and adult birds. Adult and immature annual survival for the three species were high (> 0.93 and > 0.90, respectively) and consistent across species and populations (e.g., from West and East Europe, or the Middle East). Survival of juveniles was also relatively high (generally > 0.85) but with high variation across species and populations, being lowest for griffon vultures in Western Europe. Collectively, these findings are indicative of healthy European vulture populations (of the three species studied), and highlight the positive impact of recent decades intensive conservation efforts.

Installing renewable energies necessary for the energy transition will inevitably lead to the almost immediate emergence of anthropic structures (e.g. wind turbines, solar panels, dams, etc.) worldwide. The development of these structures has a straightforward impact on wildlife, which is the subject of countless studies. However, their secondary effects on more general natural processes, such as animal movement, are rarely analysed, even though movement plays a central role in evolutionary biology, ecology, and conservation. Therefore, if the massive installation of renewable energies becomes a barrier to animal movement, it may trigger unpredictable ecological effects from individuals to ecosystems. We have conducted a quantitative review on the impacts of renewable energies on animal movement to summarise and synthesise the current knowledge explicitly. Specifically, we have analysed the effects of different technologies (e.g. solar, wind, hydro-etc) in the determinants of animal movement (How, why, when and where the movement occurs), whether it affects movement at different scales, and whether any biases persist in terms of regions, taxonomic group and renewable energy type. Here, we show some preliminary results based on the data obtained for birds, discuss some of their conservation implications, and highlight the need for information where it could be improved.