Impacts of Anthropogenic Structures on Birds

A special issue of Diversity (ISSN 1424-2818).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2026 | Viewed by 630

Special Issue Editor


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Independent Researcher, 3108 Finch Street, Davis, CA 95616, USA
Interests: wildlife, ecosystem and landscape ecology; conservation biology; sampling methods and systems analysis; animal damage management

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

For millions of years, avian habitats have included the aerosphere. Navigating the aerosphere by day and night, under extreme temperatures and wind speeds, and obscured by clouds, rain, and fog, birds have doubtlessly adapted to natural obstacles along their flight paths. Flight as a principal mode of travel leaves most birds sensitive to collisions with structures that project vertically into the aerosphere. The recent proliferation of anthropogenic structures makes many birds vulnerable to collision injuries, mortality, and the energetic costs of collision avoidance, displacement, and barrier effects. Birds are known to collide with buildings ranging in size from homes to high-rise structures, communication towers including cell towers, above-ground transmission and electric distribution lines, wind turbines and associated meteorological towers, utility-scale solar facilities, and fences of many types. Almost anything humans build above ground could interfere with birds attempting to navigate the aerosphere as an essential medium of avian travel. The impacts of anthropogenic structures potentially apply to avian populations, ecological communities, the economy, and the human experience.

This Special Issue strives to further our understanding of the effects, causal factors, and potential solutions to the impacts of anthropogenic structures on birds. We welcome papers measuring or comparing impacts and furthering our understanding of causal factors based on behavioral or morphological attributes of birds or attributes of the anthropogenic structures themselves or the environmental settings in which birds encounter these structures. We also welcome papers on strategies to avoid or minimize impacts, and on measures to rectify or reduce impacts.

Dr. Kenneth Shawn Smallwood
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • birds
  • buildings
  • collisions
  • communication towers
  • fences
  • transmission lines
  • utility-scale solar facilities
  • wind turbines

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 2320 KB  
Article
Background Mortality of Wildlife on Renewable Energy Projects
by K. Shawn Smallwood
Diversity 2025, 17(9), 628; https://doi.org/10.3390/d17090628 - 6 Sep 2025
Abstract
With the expansion of utility-scale renewable energy development worldwide, accurate estimation of bird and bat fatalities is needed for informed policy-making and appropriate formulation of mitigation strategies. Background mortality, or the mortality caused by natural as opposed to anthropogenic processes, is often identified [...] Read more.
With the expansion of utility-scale renewable energy development worldwide, accurate estimation of bird and bat fatalities is needed for informed policy-making and appropriate formulation of mitigation strategies. Background mortality, or the mortality caused by natural as opposed to anthropogenic processes, is often identified as a positive bias, and sometimes it is identified as a substantial or even leading contributor to fatality estimates. To estimate background mortality, I compiled fatalities/ha counted during searches of turbine-free study sites reported by others over 2548 ha and myself over 2297 ha. No bat fatalities were found in any of these searches. Bird fatalities/ha averaged 0.0055. I also compared estimates of fatalities/ha before and after turbine removals from 123 rows of wind turbines in California’s Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (APWRA). These turbine rows had been searched for fatalities over various periods during 1998–2002 and 2006–2014, and fatalities had been recorded at each row during first searches of new monitoring periods. I used the same search methods as the monitor, but my first searches covered 624 ha of plots centered around vacant turbine sites. I found 0.0194 (95% CI: 0.0035–0.0352) bird fatalities/ha, but no bat fatalities. I estimated that background mortality was 3.6% (95% CI: 0–6.2%), mortality caused by unremoved power lines and meteorological towers was 8.2% (95% CI: 0–15.8%), and mortality caused by wind turbines was 88.2% (95% CI: 78–100%). Contamination of carcasses from operable wind turbines ≥ 400 m distant from vacant turbine sites likely biased my estimate upward by 3.5-fold compared to natural mortality averaged among sites far from wind turbines. This study does not support the notion that background mortality contributes substantially to mortality estimates at renewable energy projects. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impacts of Anthropogenic Structures on Birds)
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