A Cost-Effective 3D Wildlife Tracking System

There are many issues that a wind developer must consider when siting a wind project, but one that has become increasingly pressing in the United States is the effect of turbines on local wildlife. New onshore wind development is occurring across the entire country and has brought wind plants into greater conflict with wildlife, especially bats. The burgeoning United States offshore wind industry is also contending with these wildlife conflict issues. This creates significant barriers for the wind industry to hit the Department of Energyĺs goal of a 100% clean electricity grid (defined as zero net greenhouse gas emissions) in 2035 which would put the United States on a path to economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050. To reduce those barriers, a cost-effective 3D wildlife tracking system based on stereo cameras and advanced processing software is proposed. The goal is to create accurate 3D wildlife tracks so that the size and the flight speed of the animal can be determined. This allows for better differentiation between groups of wildlife and species, increasing the accuracy of the classification model. The innovation proposed is to develop a hardware and software package to monitor the airspace around the turbine to directly quantify the spatial and temporal characteristics of these wildlife interactions. The result will be a field-ready system that can provide 24/7 monitoring. During Phase 2, the success in Phase 1 will be built upon by further refining and operationalizing the methods and algorithms to self-calibrate the paired camera systems in the field, using only the video footage captured normally. After completing the 3D point reconstruction method refinement, methods to reduce the residual noise from the position estimates will be applied, creating more accurate tracks of wildlife movement. Once the optimized tracks have been created, detection and track features will be created that are able to classify the wildlife to the taxonomic family level, and in some cases to the species level, with the goal of expanding the classification to identifying behavior. All improvements will be validated using GPS tracked drone flights. A field validation will be performed at operating wind turbines, where actual wildlife flights will be tracked and classified. This product would be offered directly to wind developers and operators. Customers will use this information to make more informed decisions about how to minimize their impact on wildlife. As an example, customers use bat activity metrics and their correlation with meteorological conditions to enable smart curtailment at their wind farms. Offshore wind developers are interested in recording avian movement near offshore turbines to provide local 3D tracking of species around the rotor swept area to allow estimation of micro- and meso-scale avoidance, attraction, and collision rates. Both onshore and offshore, tracking volant wildlife is a critical issue.