Monitoring at Green Energy Facilities

Project Goals: assist in post-construction monitoring at green energy facilities to detect bird and bat fatalities.

The K9 Conservationists team has a combined decade of work training and handling detection dogs to find casualties under wind turbines for post-construction monitoring. Our detection dogs are trained to find entire carcasses, scavenged and buried carcasses, feather spots, and small bone fragments. When combined with searcher efficiency trials and carcass persistence trials, detection dog teams help develop weather and migration models to reduce environmental impact and determine the efficacy of curtailment, painted blades, and other mitigation efforts.

Our wind farm detection dog teams can:

Detect bird and bat carcasses at varying stages of decay

Alert to targets without touching them, preserving DNA should species confirmation be necessary

Locate partial carcasses under thick vegetation including buried carcasses

Ignore other carcasses such as mice

Work safety and responsibly around livestock and wildlife, including ground-nesting birds, and rattlesnakes

Cover areas more quickly and efficiently than human-only searchers

Locate carcasses up to 100m upwind of a search transect (under ideal conditions)

Collaborate with your team on study design and survey strategy to meet coverage goals and model assumptions

Assist with report-writing, white papers, and/or scientific publication of finding

Our wind farm detection dogs can work on- or off-leash. Dog teams generally use two dogs per day to allow one dog to rest while the other searches each turbine. Our search dogs teams have worked on green energy projects in Wyoming, Nebraska, Illinois, and Indiana.