Assessment of the impact of technogenic monitoring sites on seasonal migration ornithocomplexes

Abstract

Today, the Azov-Black Sea coast of Ukraine is one of the most important migration routes in Europe, which is used by up to 15 million birds every season. The development of a scientific and information system for monitoring, assessing and predicting the state of biodiversity on the territories of wind power plants (WPP) in the Azov-Black Sea region is extremely important, and the study of seasonal ornithocomplexes is a key moment in the creation of wind farm sites. Assessment of the impact on them is paramount in the development of management plans and risk minimization. The studies were carried out in the Azov-Black Sea region of Ukraine at 12 monitoring sites in the period from 2010 to 2021 using modern international methods adopted in the European Community, used for these technogenic territories, as well as author’s developments. The studies that were carried out using the WEBBIRDS WEB-application for monitoring seasonal ornithocomplexes and computer modeling of assessing the impact of the wind farm site based on the server accumulation of monitoring data (an author’s development), software for calculating the risk assessment of bird collisions with wind turbines (CRM), assessing the potential biological removals (PBR) showed no significant adverse impact of wind farms on birds observed at all 12 sites. These monitoring studies make it possible to assert that the main impact on the stability of migratory bird complexes in the project area is exerted by various biotic and abiotic factors such as landscape-biotopic, forage, weather factors, and the impact of wind farms is minimal.