Scottish Marine and Freshwater Science Vol 11 No 10

The Scottish Government has set a target of 100% of Scottish demand for electricity to be met by renewable sources by 2020. The marine environment offers considerable potential with respect to harvesting renewable energy, through wind, wave and tidal stream energy generators. However, offshore renewable developments have the potential to impact on seabird populations.

Population Viability Analysis (PVA) is considered best practice in order to understand the population-level consequences of predicted impacts from renewable energy developments on seabirds.

Within this project, we evaluated and compared the performance of a range of different modelling methods for PVAs that have been used in practice. We evaluated the performance of the methods in producing accurate predictions of future “baseline” abundance – i.e., abundance in the absence of an offshore wind farm. PVAs are typically summarised, in the context of offshore renewables, in terms of metrics that compare scenarios of impact against a “baseline” projection of abundance. Caution should, therefore, be taken in relating the results of our evaluation (which is concerned with absolute abundance) directly to the ability of methods to produce accurate values of PVA metrics (which are often concerned with comparing relative abundance under different scenarios). However, we nonetheless expect the results of our evaluation to provide a useful qualitative guide to the relative strengths and limitations of different methods.