Assessing impacts on birds from onshore wind farms in Australia: an ecological risk assessment
<p>The development of wind energy production in Australia requires effective risk assessment to assist informed decision-making in order to maintain resilient and biodiverse ecosystems. An ecological risk assessment, based on life-history, biological and behavioural attributes of 1114 bird tax...
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2025
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| Shrnutí: | <p>The development of wind energy production in Australia requires effective risk assessment to assist informed decision-making in order to maintain resilient and biodiverse ecosystems. An ecological risk assessment, based on life-history, biological and behavioural attributes of 1114 bird taxa, identified those taxa at high risk from negative interactions with onshore wind farms in each of nine major terrestrial bioregions covering continental Australia. The tropical savanna bioregion contained the greatest number of taxa (<i>n</i> = 547), of which 23% were high-risk species. Tasmania had the lowest number of species (<i>n</i> = 186) but had the greatest proportion (39%) of high-risk species. The two taxa with the highest overall risk scores are both in the family Cacatuidae (Baudin’s Black-Cockatoo <i>Zanda baudinii</i>, Australian Palm Cockatoo <i>Probosciger aterrimus macgillivrayi</i>), where the risk level was a product of the height at which these birds typically fly and their adverse conservation status and long generation times. Swift Parrot (<i>Lathamus discolor</i>) had the next highest overall risk score. Quantitative assessment, monitoring and mitigation of impacts on birds from wind farms in Australia is severely hampered by a lack of consistent and comparable data on the potential and realised impacts with which to ground-truth risk assessments. In the absence of these data, estimates of the total numbers of bird mortalities associated with wind farms will be highly uncertain, and likely substantial underestimates.</p> |
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