In Support of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 3-Bat Species Status Assessment: Wind Energy Influence

Through the North American Bat Monitoring Program, United States Geological Survey (USGS) provided technical and science support to assist in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services' Species Status Assessment ("SSA") for the northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis), little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), and tri-colored bat (Perimyotis subflavus). USGS facilitated the SSA data call, provided data archival for repeatable and transparent analyses, provided statistical support to assess the historical, current, and future population status for each of the three species, and developed a demographic projection tool to evaluate future viability of each species under multiple threat scenarios. These data represent the derived species-specific index of potential wind energy influence of each NABat grid cell ("grid cell") from 2007-2020 derived based on the U.S. Wind Turbine Database after joining turbine locations to the NABat grid and aggregating at the grid cell. This metric is summarized for each grid cell and year, and reflects both the proximity of each grid cell to all wind energy locations on the landscape (with respect to the mean dispersal distance of each species in kilometers) and also the intensity (rated capacity in megawatts) at each location. It was derived based on the total rated wind energy capacities of grid cells, and the distances from grid cells with wind energy to all other NABat grid cells, the mean migration distance of each species, and an exponential dispersal kernel as a weighting function.