Posters

Abstract

Despite the clear benefits, onshore wind farms (WFs) can negatively impact biodiversity, and its expansion could overlap with other human pressures already threatening wildlife populations. Our current knowledge on the impacts of WFs is limited to groups of species, and studies of the overlaps between threats at a regional scale are lacking. Thus, this study aimed to assess the potential interactions between WFs and other human-induced threats affecting biodiversity and detect areas of high conservation importance in Europe, both in the present and future. We run a co-occurrence analysis between the locations of WFs (ongoing and future developments separately) and threat maps of the likelihood of impact of agriculture, hunting and trapping, logging, pollution, invasive species, and urbanization developed using the data IUCN Red List for birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. We also assessed the importance of these areas by comparing the number of threatened species in cells with vs. without overlapping threats involving WFs with a Mann-Whitney U Test. We found that WFs were co-occurring more frequently than expected (positive co-occurrence) with logging for mammals, agriculture for reptiles, invasive species and urbanization for amphibians. WFs were also positively cooccurring with solar panels for all groups, and dams for all except amphibians. In the future, we found that WFs only presented a new positive co-occurrence with agriculture and pollution for amphibians. A significantly higher mean number of threatened species in cells with overlapping threats was found in 58% of the threat associations for birds, 33% for mammals and reptiles, and 25% for amphibians. This study provides valuable insights that can lead to new local studies and conservation efforts in the highlighted areas, ensuring that the expansion of WFs does not come at the expense of biodiversity, and ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and resilient future.