Birdtrack is a radar engineering solution for both onshore and offshore environments; providing automatic detection and tracking of birds for surveys, monitoring and mortality risk mitigation
Birdtrack is the world’s most effective bird fatility mitigation system for wind turbines and can reduce impact to zero
The presence and operation of wind turbines and associated infrastructures, as well as actions related to their operation and maintenance lead to changes in bird behaviour, causing them to be displaced from the area. Displaced birds may no longer use suitable habitat within or close to the wind farm, which constitutes functional habitat loss.
Wind farm construction, including associated infrastructures such as substation, power lines and access roads results in some degree of land transformation. This is likely to lead to habitat fragmentation and a reduction of feeding, breeding, roosting and stopover areas available for birds.
During operation, flying birds collide with the rotating blades or with the turbine tower resulting in death or injury. This is one of the main causes of non-natural mortality in birds.
Turbines at risk from bird strike are selectively shut down by pitching their blades
Configurable for portable and fixed mounted stations with optional remote access capabilities
Optimising automatic detection, tracking and classification of bird targets
Large data collection and analysis of long time series with classification of radar targets into groups of species
Birdtrack has been designed and optimized for selective turbine shutdown as a bird mortality mitigation system for wind farms and a bird migration monitoring tool.
The radar sensor allows an early detection of bird targets before arriving at the wind farm (up to 12km detection range). Bird trajectories are tracked and collision risk is assessed. At collision risk situations turbines are selectively shut down by pitching their blades (up to 15 seconds stalling time) until birds safely fly away and the wind farm resumes production. The selected turbines remain stalled until the collision risk is eliminated.
Yes! Birdtrack can be fully utilised to reduce bat fatility for wind energy and we have many examples of where it has made a key difference.
Birdtrack provides the opportunity to develop high performance and sustainable wind energy projects by keeping high availability and production while being safe for birds.
This radar system solution includes capabilities for tracking bird and bat targets for surveys, monitoring and mortality risk mitigation. These capabilities include the detection of bird and bat activity with analysis of flight patterns, georeferenced movement parameters, pathways, altitudes, mean traffic rates and other environmental conditions. Birdtrack radar system can operate autonomously and be remotely accessed. It can be configured for portable and fixed mounted stations with optional remote access capabilities.
Birdtrack incorporates signal-processing technology and advanced tracking algorithms that optimize automatic detection, tracking and classification of bird targets.
It includes modules for automatic data grabbing, calibration, ground and weather clutter filtering. Its site-specific adaptability renders very high detection efficiency and significantly reduces errors in target classification. Birdtrack includes a database management system that stores very large datasets of georeferenced individual flight trajectories and associated parameters that allows data export for robust statistical analysis.