Summary: Regulatory agencies are constrained by legislation to make management and permitting decisions about consequences to wildlife from renewable energy. Thus, absent complete elimination of fatalities, no amount of minimization answers the question “how many dead animals is too many”. It is for this reason that there is increasing interest in understanding population level consequences of renewables for wildlife. Although there are good tools to estimate rates of wildlife fatality from renewables, there are not similar tools to estimate cumulative and population-level effects of these fatalities. Consequentially, managers often are constrained to make difficult policy and management decisions reactively and with inadequate information, causing delays in permitting and compliance management. The Renewables-Wildlife Solutions Initiative (RWSI) is designed to provide timely, data-intensive science to assist streamlining of renewable energy development by rapidly assessing relative vulnerability of potentially affected wildlife populations.

We assess relative vulnerability by: (1) developing frameworks and infrastructure for collection, archiving, and analysis of biological samples (fur, feathers, organs) from wildlife killed at renewables; (2) using those samples to biochemically assess the “catchment area” from which those fatalities are drawn; and (3) developing scientific tools to integrate catchment area data with demographic models to understand cumulative and population-level consequences of fatalities to wildlife. Here we describe the vision and initial implementation of the physical and scientific infrastructure we have developed. Subsequently, we highlight the utility of this new approach with success stories illustrating how the ~80,000 samples currently archived have supported collaborative and novel population-level vulnerability assessments, leading to tangible products that inform management decisions. We also describe plans to expand the initiative, making biological samples broadly available to the scientific and renewables-wildlife communities, and growing our ability to provide science to streamline renewable energy development.

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