Predicting bird and bat fatality risk at wind farms and proposed wind farm sites using acoustic-ultrasonic recorders

The USGS and University of Minnesota collaborators used acoustical and ultrasonic recorders to monitor flight notes of birds and calls emitted by bats flying at low elevations. Recorders were deployed in conjunction with ongoing fatality searches at wind facilities and at sites with a variety of landscape features. Objectives are to determine whether the recorders can be used to compare low-elevation flight activity among sites, and to relate recorder results to numbers of dead birds and bats found at wind facilities. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service joined the partnership to deploy the recorders at numerous locations along the shores of several Great Lakes to estimate low-elevation flight activity of birds and...

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Placing biofuel production into the context of prairie ecosystem function and sustainability

We are living in a period of unprecedented global change where even the most remote areas of the planet are influenced by the activities of man. Modern landscapes have been highly modified to accommodate a growing human population that is forecast to peak at 9.1 billion by 2050. Over this past century, human reliance on goods and services from ecosystems has greatly increased and sustainability of our modern and intensively managed ecosystems has been a topic of serious national and international concern. Not surprisingly, sustainability of ecosystems has become an explicitly stated goal of many agencies and, in some cases, has been legislatively mandated to ensure the provisioning of resources for future generations....

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Effects of wind generators on grassland breeding birds

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