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Originally Posted by The Woodman  That's good to know Johnny.
Have you any idea what would happen if it was shown that the development was detrimental?
I couldn't imagine turbines being pulled down due to a crash in Meadow Pipit numbers. |
The reason for the monitoring must be to drive future policy and guide SNH etc re their reposnse to future windfarm applications. Also to test the methodology for calculating collision risks for birds. As you probably know substantial pre-application bird surveys are undertaken, often over more than 1 year. One of the methods employed is to do timed surveys from vantage points plotting flight lines of all birds flying through the proposed turbine area. My (not overly detailed) understanding is that after these have been plotted on the turbine layout map a fairly complicated mathematical risk of collision can be calculated for different species taking into account the total survey time, the time spent in the turbine area (scaled up to a full year or appropriate part thereof for migratory species), flight direction and height, turbine height and rotor diameter together with a factor to allow for birds seeing and avoiding the turbines. In effect the result is how many (if any) of a particular species are likely to be killed in a year. Monitoring would hopefully confirm or not the figures and therefore provide a test of the method. I don't know enough about it to provide more detail I'm afraid (I'm mainly a plants and habitats man myself) but it must be published / described in EIAs as collision risk assessments are standard in EIAs.