Abstract
Over the last decade, wind energy development has been occurring in Oregon and Washington within the Columbia Plateau physiographic region (ecoregion). With this development comes the potential for direct impacts to birds and bats through collision mortality and for indirect effects through habitat fragmentation or displacement of birds and other wildlife. Proposals for wind energy developments are commonly reviewed by natural resource agencies, private conservation groups, permitting authorities and other stakeholders. Frequently, baseline studies are conducted to estimate bird and bat abundance at proposed development sites for use in impact assessments and siting project features, followed by post-construction monitoring studies to measure actual impacts from the wind-energy facility.
The purpose of this report is to estimate cumulative impacts associated with all existing, permitted, and currently proposed wind-energy facilities within the Columbia Plateau Ecoregion (CPE) of eastern Washington and Oregon. This report updates a previous version (Johnson and Erickson 2008) to account for additional bird and bat fatality estimates from the Leaning Juniper and Klondike III wind energy projects in Oregon, as well as additional raw data on species composition of turbine fatalities from the Goodnoe and White Creek wind energy facilities in Klickitat County, Washington and the Pebble and Hay Canyon wind energy facilities in Oregon. For the purpose of this analysis, we assumed that for cumulative impacts to occur, there must be a potential for a long-term reduction in the size of a population of birds or bats. When assessing the potential for cumulative impacts, it is necessary to first define the population potentially affected by wind energy development. Because birds and other animals do not recognize geopolitical boundaries, we have defined the affected population as those birds and bats of each species that breed, winter, or migrate through the CPE.