Risk Assessment and Decision Support System for Wildlife Friendly Wind Power

Wind energy development is emerging as one of the major controversial issues facing migratory bird management, especially in light of the public’s growing perception of wind energy’s detrimental effects on birds. Three DOI bureaus, the Fish and Wildlife Service, Geological Survey, and National Park Service, have recently recommended that research related to wind energy development is high priority in the Upper Midwest. Their “Report on Information Needs to Address Wind Power Development in the Midwest (February 2007)” identifies five potential projects, and our work at NoRock addresses two of those:

• Project 1: Assessment of Bird Migration Elevations in Relation to Wind Turbines
• Project 2: Risk Assessment and Decision Support System for Wildlife Friendly Wind Power

The long term objectives of our research are to develop a three dimensional conceptual model of how birds use important landscapes, collect data to validate that model (before development aspects), and then use a decision-support system to evaluate the effects of the wind energy project (after development aspects). We are beginning to develop such a model in collaboration with scientists at the Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center, the EROS Data Center, and the Western Geographic Science Center. The key to our efforts hinges on the close cooperation with field managers and biologists in the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service from locales such as Horicon National Wildlife Refuge and the Leopold Wetland Management District in Wisconsin and Sleeping Bear Dines National Lakeshore in Michigan.

Our efforts in Wisconsin focus on using structured decision making to reach consensus among managers and scientists for building the model. The model, itself, is expected to be an integration of a traditional GIS approach with ways of encoding ecologic knowledge methodologies such as Bayesian belief networks. Such networks are known for their ability to also encode the certainties associated with hypothesized cause-effect relationships. Our intent is to provide sound pragmatic decision support by combining knowledge about such divers things as geomorphology, weather, habitat, bird behavior, and management actions.

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