| Summary: | Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) conducted during pre-construction phase of offshore wind farms clearly identified interactions between turbines and marine wildlife, especially seabirds, as a concern requiring further investigation. Displacement and mortality associated with collision could lead to negative impacts on seabird populations, and needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis irrespective of turbine design. In this study, we collected data on flight behaviour, sensitivity to disturbance and conservation status for 81 seabird species present in European waters before calculating Collision and Displacement Vulnerability Indices to assess the most at risk species to wind turbines. We combined those indices with distributions of 12 commonly occurring seabird species in the North-East Atlantic based on surveys conducted between 1980 and 2018, to generate vulnerability maps for breeding, wintering and migration periods when risk is likely to vary. We shown that auks, loons and ducks are highly vulnerable to displacement while some procellariforms and larids are vulnerable to collision with wind turbines. Vulnerability to collision and displacement at the seabird community level are not evenly distributed, and vary with season according to the distribution of the most at risk species. Vulnerability maps identified areas of higher vulnerability at the European scale, highlighting where further surveys, monitoring, tracking studies, or mitigation might be needed. Finally, we identified numerous species for which there are high uncertainties due to lack of data. Within X- ROTOR, methods to reducing these uncertainties will be explored, taking into account the unique design of the X-ROTOR turbine.
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