This week, we are attending the 8th Conference on Wind energy and Wildlife impacts - CWW2025, the leading international event on wind energy and its interaction with biodiversity, which is being held in Montpellier (France) until Friday.
As part of the poster sessions, we are presenting a special feature of our ecological simulation software SimOïko, specifically designed to analyze the risk of collision between flying species and wind turbines.
This module, which we have been using in our studies since 2021, allows us to model the movements of these species (e.g., birds of prey or bats) when they are searching for food.
It is based on the CPF (“Central Place Foraging”) ecological model: we simulate individuals leaving their nests daily to search for food resources, moving around the landscape (favoring their preferred natural habitats), and returning to the nest once they have found the food they are looking for or have traveled their maximum foraging distance.
This helps wind farm developers anticipate the impacts of their projects, implement the mitigation hierarchy, and optimize the future operation of their facilities:
Identify areas where installation should be avoided because the probable number of individuals passing near the towers and blades (and therefore the risk of collision) would be too high;
Test and compare the effectiveness of different collision risk reduction scenarios, such as the installation of deterrent systems designed to scare away individuals that come too close to the towers;
For wind turbines equipped with automatic blade stop systems, assess in advance the likely frequency of activation (which occurs when an individual is detected nearby), estimate the resulting production losses, and identify scenarios that minimize the risk of shutdown;
Identify the most suitable offset areas, i.e., those offering the best potential for foraging (ensuring that the ecological gains generated by the offset measures will be equivalent to the losses caused by the project).
Want to know more ? Let's meet tonight at the poster reception, starting at 7 p.m. in the Antigone room, inside the Corum venue.
And if you feel like looking into the subject while you wait for tonight, we've prepared this short document for you https://www.terroiko.fr/sites/default/files/2025-08/SimOiko_CPF_Module_UseCase.pdf
Sylvain Moulherat, Mélodie Kunegel-Lion
