Utilizing high-resolution genetic markers to track population-level exposure of migratory birds to renewable energy development

Abstract

With new motivation to increase the proportion of energy demands met by zero-carbon sources, there is a greater focus on efforts to assess and mitigate the impacts of renewable energy development on sensitive ecosystems and wildlife, of which birds are of particular interest. One challenge for researchers, due in part to a lack of appropriate tools, has been estimating the effects from such development on individual breeding populations of migratory birds. To help address this, we utilize a newly developed, high-resolution genetic tagging method to rapidly identify the breeding population of origin of carcasses recovered from renewable energy facilities and combine them with maps of genetic variation across geographic space (called ‘genoscapes’) for five species of migratory birds known to be exposed to energy development, to assess the extent of population-level effects on migratory birds. We demonstrate that most avian remains collected were from the largest populations of a given species. In contrast, those remains from smaller, declining populations made up a smaller percentage of the total number of birds assayed. Results suggest that application of this genetic tagging method can successfully define population-level exposure to renewable energy development and may be a powerful tool to inform future siting and mitigation activities associated with renewable energy programs. Author summary: Increased demand for renewable energy, sparked by both public and government awareness of impending changes to the planet, can act as an additional impetus to understand the effects that renewable development might have on wildlife populations. Birds, in particular, may be exposed to industry activity during portions of their full migratory life cycle, but understanding how this exposure might affect distinct populations has been difficult to ascertain in the past. Here, we utilize newly-developed methods to assign individuals from five species of migratory birds to genetically distinct populations, and combine these with mortality data from renewable energy facilities (both wind and solar) and banding station data in the West and Desert Southwest of the United States, to determine the impacts that these facilities might have on populations. We found that individuals most often exposed to renewable development were from the largest populations, and that rarer populations were exposed less often, despite their closer geographic proximity to anthropogenic activities in some cases. We present this work not only as a preliminary analysis that identifies potential exposure to renewable energy development for migratory species, but also as a template to allow future work to quantitatively assess this exposure risk as compared to other natural or anthropogenic changes.

Publication information

Originally published in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation on 2023-12-28. Original DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000088.

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