Abstract
Wind turbine collision fatalities of bats have likely increased with the rapid expansion of installed wind energy capacity in the USA since the last national-level fatality estimates were generated in 2012. An assumed linear increase of fatalities with installed capacity would expand my estimate of bat fatalities across the USA from 0.89 million in 2012 to 1.11 million in 2014 and to 1.72 million in 2019. However, this assumed linear relationship could have been invalidated by shifts in turbine size, tower height, fatality search interval during monitoring, and regional variation in bat fatalities. I tested for effects of these factors in fatality monitoring reports through 2014. I found no significant relationship between bat fatality rates and wind turbine size. Bat fatality rates increased with increasing tower height, but this increase mirrored the increase in fatality rates with shortened fatality search intervals that accompanied the increase in tower heights. Regional weighting of mean project-level bat fatalities increased the national-level estimate 17% to 1.3 (95% CI: 0.15–3.0) million. After I restricted the estimate’s basis to project-level fatality rates that were estimated from fatality search intervals <10 days, my estimate increased by another 71% to 2.22 (95% CI: 1.77–2.72) million bat fatalities in the USA’s lower 48 states in 2014. Project-level fatality estimates based on search intervals <10 days were, on average, eight times higher than estimates based on longer search intervals. Shorter search intervals detected more small-bodied species, which contributed to a larger all-bat fatality estimate.
Highlights
As wind energy expands worldwide, bats are increasingly at risk of deadly encounters with wind turbines
Bat fatality rates increased with increasing tower height, but this increase mirrored the increase in fatality rates with shortened fatality search intervals that accompanied the increase in tower heights
Estimates of fatality rates of all bats did not correlate significantly with wind turbine size (MW), but they did increase with increasing tower height (Figure 1A)
Summary
As wind energy expands worldwide, bats are increasingly at risk of deadly encounters with wind turbines. The most recent effort to assess large-scale wind energy impacts on bats was in 2013, when several papers synthesized reports of fatality monitoring across North America. 196,190 to 395,886 bat fatalities at US and Canadian wind projects in 2012 [1]. Two later studies, both based on a larger accumulation of fatality monitoring reports, estimated the numbers of bats killed by US wind turbines in 2012 to have been 683,910 [2] and 888,036 (90% CI: 384,643–1,391,428) [3]. Annual fatality numbers most likely increased with installed wind energy capacity. There has been no follow-up to the 2012 USA-wide and USA-Canada estimates
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