Linder, A.C.; Lyhne, H.; Laubek, B.; Bruhn, D.; Pertoldi, C. Quantifying Raptors’ Flight Behavior to Assess Collision Risk and Avoidance Behavior to Wind Turbines. Symmetry 2022, 14, 2245, doi:10.3390/sym14112245.
Linder, A.C.; Lyhne, H.; Laubek, B.; Bruhn, D.; Pertoldi, C. Quantifying Raptors’ Flight Behavior to Assess Collision Risk and Avoidance Behavior to Wind Turbines. Symmetry 2022, 14, 2245, doi:10.3390/sym14112245.
Linder, A.C.; Lyhne, H.; Laubek, B.; Bruhn, D.; Pertoldi, C. Quantifying Raptors’ Flight Behavior to Assess Collision Risk and Avoidance Behavior to Wind Turbines. Symmetry 2022, 14, 2245, doi:10.3390/sym14112245.
Linder, A.C.; Lyhne, H.; Laubek, B.; Bruhn, D.; Pertoldi, C. Quantifying Raptors’ Flight Behavior to Assess Collision Risk and Avoidance Behavior to Wind Turbines. Symmetry 2022, 14, 2245, doi:10.3390/sym14112245.
Abstract
Some wind farms have implemented automated camera\textendash based monitoring systems e.g. IdentiFlight to mitigate the impact of wind turbines on protected raptors. These systems have effectuated the collection of large amounts of data that can be used to describe flight behavior in a novel way. This data uniquely provides both flight trajectories and images of individual birds throughout their flight trajectories. The aim of this study was to evaluate how this unique data could be used to create a robust quantitative behavioral analysis, that could be used to identify risk prone flight behavior and avoidance behavior thereby in the future assess collision risk. This was attained through a case study at a wind farm on the Swedish island Gotland, where golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), white-tailed eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla), and red kites (Milvus milvus), were chosen as the selected bird species. The results demonstrate that flight trajectories and bird images can be used to identify high risk flight behavior and thereby also used to evaluate collision risk and avoidance behavior. This study presents a promising framework for future research, demonstrating how data from camera\textendash based monitoring systems can be utilized to quantitatively describe risk prone behavior and thereby assess collision risk and avoidance behavior.
Keywords
IdentiFlight; avoidance response; golden eagle; white-tailed eagle; red kite; wind turbine curtailment; flight types
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.