Initiatives to develop renewable energy sources in the United States have resulted in the installation of thousands of wind towers, with the capacity to generate >61,000 megawatts of energy as of 2013 ( Diffendorfer et al. Our findings of modest regional overlap and that few towers have been placed in preferred crane habitat suggest that the current distribution of wind towers may be of low risk to the continued persistence of wintering midcontinental Sandhill Cranes in the central and southern Great Plains. Results from a habitat selection model suggested that distances between crane locations and towers may have been driven more by habitat selection than by avoidance, as most wind towers were constructed in locations not often selected by wintering cranes. Using data from cranes marked after tower construction, we found a potential indication of avoidance behavior, whereby GPS-marked cranes generally used areas slightly more distant from existing wind towers than would be expected by chance. When we looked at individually marked cranes, we found that 52% would have occurred within 10 km of a tower at some point during winter. Based on this analysis, we found 7% spatial overlap between the distributions of cranes and towers. We estimated the wintering distributions of PTT-marked cranes prior to the construction of wind towers, which we compared with current tower locations. We used data from cranes marked with platform transmitting terminals (PTTs) with and without global positioning system (GPS) capabilities.
In an initial assessment of the potential risks of wind towers to cranes, we estimated spatial overlap, investigated potential avoidance behavior, and determined the habitat associations of cranes. Numerous wind energy projects have been constructed in the central and southern Great Plains, USA, the main wintering area for midcontinental Sandhill Cranes ( Grus canadensis).
0 kommentar(er)
