Wildlife Mortality

The goal of this National Science Foundation (NSF) funded development project is to reduce the conflict between wind energy deployment and wildlife, smoothing the path to a world powered by renewables. While wind turbines are a carbon-free energy source, that do have an impact on wildlife, including causing the fatality of birds and bats. In recent years bats and eagles have emerged as a critical focus for the wind industry since there are several protected species whose territories overlap with existing and forthcoming wind development sites. The current method of estimating wildlife mortality at onshore wind projects is expensive and imprecise. All the major stakeholders involved, including environmental regulators, wind developers, environmental consultants, and conservation organizations, want a more accurate and less costly impact assessment method.

To solve this problem, we are using cameras attached to the base of the wind turbine tower coupled with advanced video processing techniques and artificial intelligence to detect bat activity and mortality around utility-scale wind turbines. The current method of determining an onshore wind turbine’s impact on wildlife requires biologists to walk transects in cleared plots around the turbines looking for carcasses. This method is not only expensive, it also leads to uncertain mortality estimates. For offshore wind turbine’s there is currently no methods for determining impacts, which may hinder the ability to permit projects.

As part of this project we compared the use of thermal video versus near infrared video for capturing bat activity.