The Second Solar Power and Wildlife/Natural Resources Symposium was held in Norfolk, VA on November 14-16, 2023.
About
The biennial Solar Power and Wildlife/Natural Resources Symposium (Solar Symposium) convenes stakeholders from academia, industry, the conservation sector, and public agencies to review the state of the science and identify research gaps and priority questions. The Second Solar Symposium convened leading scientists and other stakeholders to continue productive discussions and collaborations toward finding solutions and identifying opportunities to benefit biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Second Solar Symposium Proceedings
The world is experiencing two entangled crises—climate change and biodiversity loss—that must be addressed simultaneously. Renewable energy, particularly large-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar energy development, is a key component in the fight against these crises. PV solar presents unique risks and challenges, including direct mortality and habitat loss (among others) to certain native biodiversity and other natural resources, while it also mitigates climate change and provides opportunities to enhance biodiversity and benefit ecosystem services under specific scenarios. Our current understanding of these risks, challenges, and benefits is low and limited geographically and taxonomically, but we gain valuable knowledge every year due to dedicated stakeholder groups including scientists, solar energy developers, the conservation sector, and government wildlife agencies.
These proceedings reflect current research and concepts around balancing conservation and the rapid build-out of solar energy, and they include sessions on communication among stakeholders, avian-solar interactions, wildlife habitat loss and fragmentation, vegetation management and biodiversity responses, data standards and sharing, and technological solutions to studying biodiversity responses.