Abstract
The Scottish Government is committed to increasing the production of electricity from renewable sources, with a target of generating 100% of Scotland’s electricity requirements from renewable sources by 2020. The marine environment offers considerable potential with respect to harvesting renewable energy, through wind, wave and tidal stream energy generators. However, the Scottish Government is also committed to protecting the natural environment from adverse impacts in accordance with the requirements of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (EC/2008/56), the Habitats Directive (EC/92/43) and the Birds Directive (EC/79/409). Central to delivering these is the designation of important areas for species identified in the relevant Directives. For example, under the Birds Directive these are known as Special Protection Areas (SPAs).
Offshore renewable developments (ORDs) have the potential to impact on seabird populations that are protected by the EU Birds Directive due to collisions, displacement from foraging habitat, barrier effects, noise and contamination (Drewitt & Langston 2006; Larsen & Guillemette 2007; Masden et al. 2010; Grecian et al. 2010, Langton et al. 2011, Scottish Government 2011). These potential effects are predicted to be particularly important for breeding seabirds that, as central place foragers, are constrained to obtain food within a certain distance from the breeding colony (Daunt et al. 2002; Enstipp et al 2006).
A critical component of the process to inform sectoral plans, Strategic Environmental Assessments and other impact assessments such as EIAs and HRAs, is to develop a better understanding of the relative sensitivities of offshore areas to licensed activities in relation to protected seabird populations. This project is building upon the existing evidence base, for which step changes in the estimation of seabird at sea distributions in breeding and non-breeding seasons have recently been made. We have developed a fast, user-friendly tool to estimate the sensitivities of key seabird species to Offshore Renewable Developments in all Scottish waters and produce relative and absolute spatially explicit risk estimates for at-sea locations across a suite of species in both the breeding and non-breeding seasons. The tool will allow users to perform assessment of all Scottish waters or for specified footprints, in relation to multiple seabird species.
See corresponding fact sheet: ORJIP Seabird Sensitivity Mapping Tool for more information.