Insufficient Sampling to Identify Species Affected by Turbine Collisions

We compared the number of avian species detected and the sampling effort during fatality monitoring at 50 North American wind facilities. Facilities with short intervals between sampling events and high effort detected more species, but many facilities appeared undersampled. Species accumulation curves for 2 wind facilities studied for more than 1 year had yet to reach an asymptote. The monitoring effort that is typically invested is likely inadequate to identify all of the species killed by wind turbines. This may understate impacts for rare species of conservation concern that collide infrequently with turbines but suffer disproportionate consequences from those fatalities. Published 2015. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.