Project: BayWa r.e. ground-mounted solar park
Location: Andalucía, Spain
Cost: ~300 000 EUR
Dates: Implementation to commence 2024
Objectives: Improving biodiversity and local habitat conditions onsite. Establishing monitoring to enable effective adaptive management strategies that provide benefits for the ecosystem and community.
Measures undertaken: Installation of perimeter vegetation screens and planting grass to provide wildlife shelter and/or ground nesting whilst also reducing the plant’s visual impact. Installation of 15 nest boxes on posts for barn owls (Tyto alba) and common kestrels (Falco tinnunculus) and the construction of 2 nesting towers for lesser kestrel (Falco naumanni), listed as Vulnerable in the Spanish Red Book of birds.
Provisioning of rock piles for amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals to shelter. Construction of 3 ponds to provide habitats for amphibians. Installation of 13 water troughs (tanks with a capacity of 220 litres connected to a concrete basin so that water is permanently available) for wildlife along the outskirts of the facility. These are periodically refilled, especially during summer months, with water of a proven quality,
and annually checked and disinfected. Provisioning of 8 perches along the plant’s perimeter for bird of prey species. Improvement to the condition of 35 ha of steppe habitat, including increasing the area of natural vegetation and ecosystem services they provide as an additional development compensation measure.
Challenges:
- Obtaining project acceptance from local administration and stakeholders.
Success factors:
- Applying biodiversity measurement methodologies aligned with proven methodology that allows BayWa r.e. to obtain reliable results on which to base future measures to be implemented;
- Developing a social action plan to increase the acceptance of the project and contribute to local sustainable development goals. Through a multi-faceted approach which included stakeholder workshops, reconnaissance tours of the environment and the preparation of field notebooks, voluntary workdays, citizen participation laboratories to tackle local challenges, and partnering with local universities to form an interdisciplinary research group whose findings will ultimately inform a comprehensive and bespoke site strategy;
- Gaining a detailed understanding of the existing problems and proposing tailored conservation measures aligned with the real needs of the area, instead of generic measures; and
- Adaptively managing and modifying biodiversity integration measures in response to evolving circumstances during the project phases.
Images copyright: BayWa r.e.