On the 24th of October, the British Ornithologists’ Union (BOU) held its Annual Science Meeting in York. This year, the theme of the meeting was “Birds and net zero: mechanisms, impacts and solutions in the transition to clean energy”. The day was a great opportunity to bring together those working on bird ecology in the context of both offshore and onshore renewable energy development. A variety of topics were covered during the formal talks and resulting discussions, including ecosystem approaches to understanding impacts, understanding uncertainty, and understanding population-level consequences of renewable energy developments.

Adam Butler and Katherine Whyte from BioSS attended the conference and both contributed talks, providing updates on two of our current research projects. Adam Butler presented on “Expert elicitation to investigate effectiveness of compensatory measures for offshore wind impacts on seabirds”, sharing work from the ECOWind ECOWINGS project. Katherine Whyte presented on “Understanding predator-prey interactions in the context of offshore wind farm development”, sharing work from the OWEC PrePARED project.

Photo: Adam Butler presenting on the ECOWINGS project