2024-01-07 19:38:00
A scientific study by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and some Philipps University of Marburgpublished in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation demonstrated that wind turbines would have a negative impact on the life of bats.
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Excessive noise pollution
To meet the planet’s growing energy supply needs, the world is increasingly turning to wind turbines. In 2022, Germany was the fifth country in which the energy provided by wind turbines was the highest relative to their electricity production. Today, the country has 30,000 wind turbines.
The study demonstrated that when wind speeds are high and wind turbines are operating, the activity of surrounding bats decreases by almost 80% within a radius of 80 to 450 meters in this area.
“We found that the activity of bats, which typically forage in narrow, structurally dense forest vegetation, decreased by an average of 77% within a radius of 80 to 450 meters around wind turbines with increasing wind speed. wind when the wind turbines are in operation. In contrast, bat activity was not affected by wind speed when the wind turbines were turned off” confided Julia Ellerbrok, former doctoral student of the project and now postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology of the Philipps University.
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“They are losing valuable habitat on a large scale”
For researchers, the drop in this activity can be explained by the noise pollution caused by the operation of the wind turbine when the wind speed is high. A noise that could be heard over a long distance, which would drive bats from a habitat so valuable to them.
“Wind turbine rotor movements generate not only wake turbulence, but also significant noise. Both factors can affect bats over several hundred meters. Forest bats that hunt under the canopy probably do not come into contact with wake vortices. Rather, they could be affected by noise emissions from wind turbines, even though the frequency range of the noise is much lower than that of echolocation calls. If bats actively avoid noise emissions from wind turbines, they lose valuable habitat on a large scale” explained Christian Voigt, head of the Department of Evolutionary Ecology at Leibniz-IZW.
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