Assessing Impacts of Offshore Development and Habitat Alteration on Distribution and Abundance of Birds

Lead/Team: S. McWilliams and P. Paton

Applied quantitative modeling techniques (including density surface modeling, resource selection functions, boosted hierarchical models) to directly assess impacts of offshore renewable energy (ORE) on bird distribution and abundance; strategies to use boat-based and aerial surveys to assess the distribution of avian populations pre- and construction of ORE; assessing movements of birds with various tracking technologies to develop spatially-explicit models of avian utilization of offshore habitats; formal ‘damage assessment’ to determine financial compensation associated offshore development on bird populations; application of bird ecophysiology to conservation. 2008 – Present.