Abstract
Increasing numbers of wind power plants (WPP) are constructed across the globe to reduce the anthropogenic contribution to global warming. There are, however, concerns on the effects of WPP on human health as well as related effects on wildlife. To address potential effects of WPP in environmental impact assessments, existing models accounting for shadow flickering and noise are widely applied. However, a standardized, yet simple and widely applicable proxy for the visibility of rotating wind turbines in woodland areas was largely lacking up to date. We combined land cover information of forest canopy extracted from orthophotos and airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data to represent the visibility of rotating wind turbines in five woodland study sites with a high spatial resolution. Performing an in-situ validation in five study areas across Europe which resulted in a unique sample of 1738 independent field observations, we show that our approach adequately predicts from where rotating wind turbine blades are visible within woodlands or not. We thus provide strong evidence, that our approach yields a valuable proxy of the visibility of moving rotor blades with high resolution which in turn can be applied in environmental impact assessments of WPP within woodlands worldwide.