Displacement Model: Foraging Seabirds

This is a model, written in R, to simulate the effects of offshore wind farms upon seabird foraging behaviour, and the ultimate consequences of this for adult and chick survival.

It is called the “simplified” model to distinguish it from the displacement model that has already been developed by CEH which is more biologically realistic in a number of ways, but substantially more computationally-intensive to run.

The model has been designed for use with four specific proposed offshore wind farms in the Forth-Tay region, and for use with five specific species (guillemot, kittiwake, puffin, gannet and razorbill). Much of the code can be readily-applied to different species, wind farms and SPAs, but some cannot – we have attempted to make the code as generic as possible, but it does not, and was not designed to, provide general code for modelling the effects of any wind farm in any geographical area.  The model can be downloaded from the table below.

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