While wind energy is environmentally friendly, and prevents climate change, it has well-known impacts in terms of collision of raptors and other wildlife with wind turbine blades, leading often to a conflict. In this paper the authors focus in an area in Greece that has the only population of black (cinereous) vultures in south-eastern Europe and 13 existing and some more planned wind farms, most in the black vulture core area of occurrence. The authors used long-term telemetry data to produce a species-specific sensitivity map for guiding wind energy development and to estimate vulture collision mortality due to currently operating wind farms.
Mortality due to Collision was estimated as 5–11% of the population, sufficient to lead to population decline.
Combining spatial-use models derived from telemetry data with collision mortality models offers a novel conservation tool for evaluating large scale wind energy development proposals, and is a valuable tool to improve the quality of Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) studies and national Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) for wind farms.
You can download the paper below.
Photo Bruno Berthémy
Black vultures & wind farm development Cinereous vultures (Aegypius monachus) a Adobe Acrobat Document 873.5 KB Download
