Assessing potential conflicts between offshore wind farms and migration patterns of a threatened shorebird species

• Published in: Animal Conservation
• Main Authors: Schwemmer, Philipp, Pederson, Rebecca, Haecker, Karena, Bocher, Pierrick, Fort, Jerome, Mercker, Mercker, Jiguet, Frédéric, Elts, Jaanus, Marja, Riho, Piha, Markus, Rousseau, Pierre, Garthe, Stefan
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2023
• Subjects: article; ScholarlyArticle; Published Version; ddc:590; marine spatial planning; Baltic Sea; Eurasian curlew; flight altitude; flight speed; phenology; spatio-temporal autocorrelation; biologging; Eurasian Curlew; Numenius arquata
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.12817; https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:gbv:8:3-2024-00300-7; https://macau.uni-kiel.de/receive/macau_mods_00004582; https://macau.uni-kiel.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/macau_derivate_00005861/Animal%20Conservation%20-%202022%20-%20Schwemmer%20-%20Assessing%20potential%20conflicts%20between%20offshore%20wind%20farms%20and%20migration%20patterns.pdf

Installation of offshore wind farms (OWFs) is becoming increasingly important to ensure a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; however, OWFs also pose a threat to migrating birds and other wildlife. Informed marine spatial planning is therefore crucial, but individual-based high-resolution data on bird migration across the sea are currently lacking. We equipped 51 individuals of the near threatened Eurasian curlew Numenius arquata with GPS tags (118 fl ight tracks) across multiple years and countries to assess their four-dimensional migration routes across the Baltic Sea (i.e. fl ight tracks, altitudes, phenology and diurnal patterns), to inform collision-risk models and assess potential con fl icts with current and future OWFs. Despite a broad-front migration, we identi fi ed core migration areas in the south-western Baltic Sea (and adjacent mainland), largely overlapping with already operating OWFs. Generalized linear models based on a resampling procedure to overcome autocorrelation of tracking data showed that fl ight altitudes across the sea and during autumn (median: 60 m) were signi fi cantly lower than those across land (median: 335 m) and during spring (median across sea: 150; median across land: 576 m).