Natural Power is set to attend the forthcoming American Wind Wildlife Institute's Wind Wildlife Meeting which takes place from Wednesday November 27th through Friday November 30th at the Intercontinental St Paul Riverfront Hotel, St Paul, Minnesota.

Exhibiting at the event, the team will be taking a number of slots on the agenda:

- David Tidhar, Senior Environmental Consultant, will be presenting a poster on ‘Overcoming methodological variation and reducing uncertainty using a questions base approach for due diligence on Wednesday 28th at 2.55pm and on Thursday 29th at 4pm and 6.15pm.
- Christine Sutter, Head of Environment, will chair the session ‘Technologies for Reducing Impacts to Bats on Thursday 29 Nov, 2.35pm - 4.00pm

Davids poster presentation will explore the following topic:
In the mature markets, such as the US and UK, many methods used for assessing risk and monitoring the effects of wind projects to wildlife and habitats are well established, have been repeatedly implemented by practioners, and are supplemented by both industry and statutory guidance. Stakeholders are often experienced in assessing the approaches used and interpreting study findings, often resulting in reduced time frames and costs. In contrast, wind wildlife assessments in many emerging markets are immature; methodological variation is much higher and greater stakeholder uncertainty exists, particularly in situations where regional comparisons are absent. These issues are highly apparent in a due diligence context. To try and address high levels of uncertainty and methodological variation (and often inadequacies), Natural Power utilizes a hierarchal questions-based framework aimed to identify key risks.

Christines bat session will look at a number of keys areas including:
Assessing changes in bat activity in response to an acoustic deterrent - implications for decreasing bat fatalities at wind energy facilities, using thermal videography to compare bat activity and behaviour at turbines equipped with ultrasonic acoustic deterrents, testing ultrasonic acoustic deterrents for reducing bat fatalities at wind turbines in south Texas and the potential population-level benefit of turbine fatality reduction measures for hoary bats.

To view the conference agenda and list of workshops and poster presentations, please visit https://www.nationalwind.org/meetings/wind-wildlife-research-meeting-xii/

The biennial NWCC Wind Wildlife Research Meeting provides an internationally recognized forum for researchers and wind wildlife stakeholders to hear contributed papers, view research posters, and listen to panels that discuss the most recent wind power-related wildlife research. Academics, researchers, conservation scientists, consultants, federal and state officials, NGO representatives, and wind industry professionals come together every other year for this unique opportunity.

In addition to Christine Sutter and David Tidhar, Natural Powers Director of Planning and Environment, Chris Pendlebury, will also be attending the Wind Wildlife Meeting. If youd like to pre-arrange a meeting with any of the team, please contact sayhello@naturalpower.com