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  • Number 408  |
  • March 3, 2014

NREL database WILD about cataloging wildlife's interaction with wind energy

This photo of a red-tailed hawk was taken on NREL's campus. NREL’s WILD (Wind-Wildlife Impacts Literature Database) is a large, browsable collection of documents on the impacts to wildlife of wind energy, tidal and wave energy, power lines, and towers. (Photo by Dennis Schroeder/NREL)

This photo of a red-tailed hawk was taken
on NREL's campus. NREL’s WILD
(Wind-Wildlife Impacts Literature Database)
is a large, browsable collection of documents
on the impacts to wildlife of wind energy,
tidal and wave energy, power lines, and
towers. (Photo by Dennis Schroeder/NREL)

How do reindeer adapt to wind turbines in the tundra?

Are porpoises spooked by the noise of pile driving when offshore wind turbines are installed on the ocean floor?

Are bats more susceptible than birds to colliding with the huge turbines' slowly turning blades?

Researchers, students, and the millions of people who consider themselves both environmentalists and animal lovers now have a one-stop shop for answers to these questions—and many more.

WILD (Wind-Wildlife Impacts Literature Database) is a large, browsable collection of documents on the impacts to wildlife of wind energy, tidal and wave energy, power lines, and towers. Created by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), wild.nrel.gov includes journal articles, conference papers, government reports, environmental impact studies, and more.

“The site doesn’t include newspaper articles or opinion pieces and explicitly does not try to tip the scales on whether wind energy is a small or large threat to wildlife,” says Tami Sandberg, an NREL librarian who has steered the transformation of the database into a user-friendly tool.

She warns against drawing a conclusion after reading only a few documents. There are articles that conclude that the risk is small compared to other forms of energy or other structures erected in nature, such as the paper from the 2009 Renewable Energy Congress that indicates that feral cats killed 5,000 times more birds than wind power did, and that fossil fuels, pesticides, and building windows were 700 to 4,000 times more likely to cause avian deaths than wind energy.

There are also articles that counter those conclusions, including one from National Wind Watch that says wind power is a unique threat to raptors and other large birds such as duck, geese, swans, and cranes. Government documents show the history of environmental impact studies and the efforts by wildlife groups to impose moratoriums until impact studies are complete.

These documents can be deadly serious for researchers, but browsing can be fascinating.

If you want to know a statistic as specific as electrocution mortality in raptors, you can look at a 2013 Journal of Wildlife Management study that found that transformer poles had the greatest rates of death, but that 94% of electrocution mortality was not associated with a power outage. The report advises utilities and wildlife managers on how to delineate the retrofitting of structures to lower raptor mortality.

If that’s not enough, a 2013 study in Wildlife Society Bulletin quantifies the total lost bird years from 172 projected collisions of white-tailed eagles into wind turbines in Norway through 2027, then offers a formula for the total monetary compensation. The report then suggests that the money can be paid up front and go toward retrofitting hundreds of pylons.

“We don’t make any calls in terms of the content,” Sandberg said. WILD allows users to browse according to animal, technology, geography, publication year, and publication type. For the sake of the non-expert, animals aren’t arranged by their genus and species names, but by groupings such as songbirds, raptors, marine mammals, and so forth.

WILD started more than a dozen years ago as the Avian Literature Database, drawing its early records from two California Energy Commission bibliographies: Avian Collision and Electrocution: An Annotated Bibliography and Effects of Wind Energy Development: An Annotated Bibliography. Since then, Sandberg and more recently her colleague Jennifer Abbott have improved it by applying new technology such as Open Source to the website.

For example, when the Google Scholar search engine came along, Sandberg registered search terms on the site and now gets frequent emails  alerting her of new or previously undiscovered studies from all over the world on wind-wildlife impacts.

From its origin as a cataloguing of documents on birds, the literature database expanded to fish, dolphins, other marine mammals, and land mammals.

WILD contains documents on the impacts to desert tortoises, prairie chickens, grouse, whales. Each new item is assigned keywords—“raptor, Europe, wind turbine, Journal of Wildlife Biology,” for example—before it is uploaded to the database.

“We upgraded the database and went live last September," Sandberg said. "There is a huge body of literature that we haven’t yet added, but having two of us working now will help.”

“It’s filling a need, giving researchers and other interested people one place to go to find what they need,” Abbott added.

The NREL librarians are earnest about continually updating and maintaining the collection, and the website includes a link to contact them with any suggestions to improve the site or uncover new or undiscovered documents. The goal is to keep WILD easy to use, relevant, and authoritative.

“Our goal is to find everything that is subject-relevant and let the user draw conclusions as to the validity of the work,” Sandberg said.

[Bill Scanlon, 303.275.4051,
william.scanlon@nrel.gov]