Wistaria Ranch Solar Energy Center
Live Oak Associates assisted Wistaria Ranch Solar, LLC from 2013 to 2014 in addressing landscape scale conservation questions related to burrowing owl and the development of several thousand acres of farmland in the Imperial Valley for adoption into the EIR that was being prepared for the project.
Analyzing the impacts from utility-scale solar farms on burrowing owl populations in the Imperial Valley provided a set of challenges, but also allowed for some unique opportunities not afforded other projects within the range of the owl in California.
The unusually high abundance of owls and the scale of the solar farms afford in some cases (i.e., rigorous data collection and high integrity with the data) the use of robust statistical and spatial tools to more precisely quantify the impact to core foraging habitat. In the case of the Wistaria Project, we were able to rely on a robust data set collected by others in designing an analytic framework that provided evidence on spatial use patterns of burrowing owl on several thousand acres of farmland. This robust dataset afforded a unique opportunity to statistically estimate occupancy.
This rare and unique intersection of a large data set and large spatial scale allowed the use of robust statistical tools to inform both the impact assessment and mitigation strategy. The advantages of this approach over the reliance on generalized decision rules (e.g., 200 m buffer) is that we are able to infer patterns of species occurrence specific to the site. This provided a robust metric to estimate impacts from the project on burrowing owls within a regional context and this was used to inform a mitigation strategy tailored to offset the impact.
Client
Wistaria Ranch Solar, LLC
Location
Imperial County, California
Dates
2013-2014
Project Description
Wistaria Ranch Solar, LLC needed help in addressing landscape scale conservation questions related to burrowing owl and the development of several thousand acres of farmland in the Imperial Valley for adoption into the EIR that was being prepared for the project.