Jacopo Cerri , Ilaria Fozzi, Chiara Costantino, Dhyan Anaja Banič, Davide De Rosa, Joel Echeverria, Luce Pavin, Marco Muzzeddu, Martina Scacco, Dionigi Secci, Fiammetta Berlinguer

Multiple studies assessed the collision risk of different vulture species with wind turbines. However, they relied on different sources of wind turbine data, and the effect of this data heterogeneity, on the estimated collision risk and the comparability of these assessments, has not been investigated.
We used GPS and accelerometer data, collected from 6 adult Griffon Vultures living in Sardinia (Italy), a hotspot of wind energy development, to assess how the use of different wind turbine data sources influences collision risk assessments. As a measure of collision risk, we compared changes in the proportion of foraging grounds overlapping with the wind turbine locations obtained from three different sources available for Sardinia: Open Street Maps, a map available from Smeraldo et al. (2020), and a map obtained from aerial pictures, available from Cerri et al. (2024). We finally used information about planned wind turbines to evaluate how the overlap (area of collision risk) is likely to change in the near future.
We found that the source of wind turbine data can strongly influence the output of collision risk estimates. Turbines identified from aerial pictures overlapped more with foraging grounds (18.7%) than turbines from Open Street Maps (8.7%) and from Smeraldo et al. (15.9%). Finally, 31.4% of vultures’ foraging grounds would overlap with turbines in the next few years, almost doubling the area currently considered at risk.
We suggest that developing reliable, accessible and periodically updated maps of existing and planned wind turbines should be a priority for environmental agencies, given its importance for conservation planning and the increase in renewable energy development.