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Although wind power is a promising source of renewable energy, previous studies have focused on uncovering species and abundance decreases caused by wind farms. However, very few studies focus on collision risk of onshore wind farms in relation to birds’ movements which are the important indicators for balancing wind energy development and biodiversity conservation. Here, birds’ movement were recorded by combining 15 ducks’ satellite tracking and six field surveys to assess collision risks in Yangtze River Mouth, the wintering site for migratory waterbirds along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway. It is found that distances between ducks’ locations and nearest wind turbines in middle and later wintering periods were significantly higher than during early period. Besides, ducks inside wind farm tended to fly outside turbine rotor height range (45–135 m: between lowest and highest points the rotor tips) within 300 m from the dyke where the turbines were located, thus decreasing their collision risk. Ducks also tended to fly below the minimum rotor tip height (< 45 m) when the turbines were rotating. These results suggest that ducks adopt behavioural avoidance strategies in response to wind farms, and turning off turbines to reduce collision risks may be unnecessary.

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No abstract

Urbanization has a significant influence on amphibian communities, populations, and individuals because of habitat loss, degradation of habitat quality, and habitat fragmentation. Advertisement calls of anurans are used for communication and play an important role in reproduction; however, how anthropogenic noise and habitat change caused by urbanization affect anuran advertisement calls is less well known. In this study, we examined changes in the advertisement calls of two frog species, the ornamented pygmy frog (Microhyla fissipes) and rice frog (Fejervarya multistriata), during the breeding season along an urban–rural gradient in Shanghai, China. We used the percentage of impervious area (including buildings and roads) in each 2 km-radius landscape to represent the urbanization index of 34 study sites. We then measured five advertisement call parameters (call duration, call interval, call rate, pulse rate, and dominant frequency) of these two species (100 males of F. multistriata and 89 males of M. fissipes) in each study site from May to July in 2020 and 2021. We explored how the urbanization index and other variables (air temperature, snout–vent length and calling situation (one frog species calling, or two frog species calling together)) in each study site affected these call parameters. The results showed that the dominant frequency of M. fissipes was significantly negatively related to urbanization index, and call duration and call interval were significantly negatively related to air temperature; furthermore, call rate and pulse rate were significantly positively related to air temperature, and call duration was also significantly positively related to snout–vent length. For F. multistriata, pulse rate was significantly negatively related to urbanization index, snout–vent length, and situation (two frog species calling together), but significantly positively related to air temperature; by contrast, call interval was significantly positively related to snout–vent length. We suggested that these two frog species had different responses to urbanization, which could help us to better understand the change of anuran breeding behaviors and reproductive life-history strategies in the face of rapid urbanization.