Wind energy development can lead to guild-specific habitat loss in boreal forest bats

Forest management rarely considers protecting bats in Fennoscandian regions although all species rely on forest habitat at some point in their annual cycle. This issue is especially evident as wind parks have increasingly been developed inside Fennoscandian forests, against the advice of international bat conservation guidelines. In this study, we aimed to describe and explain bat community dynamics at a Norwegian wind park located in a boreal forest, especially to understand potential avoidance or attraction effects. The bat community was sampled acoustically and described using foraging guilds (short, medium, and long-range echolocators; SRE, MRE, LRE) as well as behavior (commuting, feeding and social calls). Sampling was undertaken at two locations per turbine: (i) the turbine pad and (ii) a paired natural habitat at ground level, as well as from a meteorological tower. We used a recently developed method for camera trapping nocturnal flying insects synchronously with bat acoustic a..., A detailed description of the methods can be found in the research article associated with DOI: 10.1002/wlb3.01168., , # Wind energy development can lead to guild-specific habitat loss in boreal forest bats

This data was collected in between July and October 2020 at Marker Wind Park in Ørje, Norway.

Bat acoustic monitoring took place from 1 July to 29 September 2020 at seven wind turbines. Wildlife Acoustics Song-Meter4-BATFS detectors combined with either SMM-U2 or SMM-U1 microphones were deployed at ground-level (microphone approximately 2 m high).

Images were taken with a a digital camera (Ricoh WG-6 Waterproof 20m/65.6ft; Model R02050 2019) oriented skyward attached to an external battery supply which made it possible for the camera to take images every 10 minutes continuously.

A more detailed description of the methods can be found in the research article associated with DOI: 10.1002/wlb3.01168.

*NOTE: The weather data used in this study is the property of Marker Wind Park and therefor cannot be shared openly. The datasets in this workflow which include weather data are not available to shar...