Potential collision risk of harriers Circus spp. with wind turbines during breeding season derived from GPS tracking
type: CreativeWork
description: Raptors have been shown to be especially vulnerable to collide with wind turbines, but knowledge on particular species-specific aspects of flight behaviour that determine the collision risk has remained limited. In this context, GPS telemetry represents a promising but hitherto seldom applied technique. I used an extensive collection of GPS tracking data, including high-resolution flight tracks (measurement interval of 3 s), to investigate the collision risk of breeding male Montagu’s Harriers Circus pygargus (MoH; n = 24 individuals), Hen Harriers C. cyaneus (HH; n = 3) and Western Marsh-harriers C. aeruginosus (MaH; n = 3) in the Dutch-German border area. First, the relevant flight behaviour characteristics were quantified separately. For MoH, these were subsequently incorporated in a collision risk model to estimate their present collision-induced mortality in the study area. Furthermore, several scenarios of future wind energy developments were studied. On average, MoH and MaH spent as much as 8.2 and 7.0 h per day on the wing, as opposed to 4.3 h in HH. The vast majority of flights occurred close to the ground, reflecting the harriers’ particular foraging behaviour. Only 7.1 (MoH), 9.6 (HH) and 3.3 % (MaH) of GPS fixes lay within the rotor height range of an average wind turbine (45-125 m). When comparing different turbine models, the proportion of time spent at risk heights increased exponentially with decreasing minimum rotor tip height (MRTH). MoH spent on average 2.0 % of time inside wind farms, and the extent of wind farm usage was negatively correlated to the nest-to-wind-farm distance. Both MoH and MaH showed avoidance behaviour, approaching turbines significantly less often than expected from a null model of random flight trajectories. The avoidance rate amounted to 94.2 and 69.0 %, respectively. For the present state, with wind farms situated in the fringes of the nesting range of the studied MoH population, the collision risk models indicated a rather…
abstract: Raptors have been shown to be especially vulnerable to collide with wind turbines, but knowledge on particular species-specific aspects of flight behaviour that determine the collision risk has remained limited. In this context, GPS telemetry represents a promising but hitherto seldom applied technique. I used an extensive collection of GPS tracking data, including high-resolution flight tracks (measurement interval of 3 s), to investigate the collision risk of breeding male Montagu’s Harriers Circus pygargus (MoH; n = 24 individuals), Hen Harriers C. cyaneus (HH; n = 3) and Western Marsh-harriers C. aeruginosus (MaH; n = 3) in the Dutch-German border area. First, the relevant flight behaviour characteristics were quantified separately. For MoH, these were subsequently incorporated in a collision risk model to estimate their present collision-induced mortality in the study area. Furthermore, several scenarios of future wind energy developments were studied. On average, MoH and MaH spent as much as 8.2 and 7.0 h per day on the wing, as opposed to 4.3 h in HH. The vast majority of flights occurred close to the ground, reflecting the harriers’ particular foraging behaviour. Only 7.1 (MoH), 9.6 (HH) and 3.3 % (MaH) of GPS fixes lay within the rotor height range of an average wind turbine (45-125 m). When comparing different turbine models, the proportion of time spent at risk heights increased exponentially with decreasing minimum rotor tip height (MRTH). MoH spent on average 2.0 % of time inside wind farms, and the extent of wind farm usage was negatively correlated to the nest-to-wind-farm distance. Both MoH and MaH showed avoidance behaviour, approaching turbines significantly less often than expected from a null model of random flight trajectories. The avoidance rate amounted to 94.2 and 69.0 %, respectively. For the present state, with wind farms situated in the fringes of the nesting range of the studied MoH population, the collision risk models indicated a rather…
author: Schaub, Tonio
keywords: Windenergie, Kollisionsrisiko, Vogelschutz, Greifvögel, GPS-Telemetrie, wind energy, collision risk, bird conservation, raptors, GPS tracking
date published: 2017-10-17
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:52:13Z
provider: Universität Potsdam - Thes
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Universität Potsdam