Environmental Science
AI-Enabled Avian-Solar Interaction Monitoring
EVS has developed an AI technology that collects bird activity data from video recordings to understand implications of solar energy facilities on bird populations.
How do birds interact with solar farms? Solar energy development could impact birds both positively and negatively, but field surveys do not provide sufficient data to accurately understand the nature and magnitude of impacts. Because data collection is not continuous, these methods cannot observe bird behavior around solar panels that could indicate causes of fatality, sources of attraction, and potential benefits to birds.
In collaboration with Argonne’s Strategic Security Sciences division, EVS has developed a technology to monitor avian interactions with photovoltaic (PV) solar farms (e.g., perching, fly-through, and collisions) in a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO). The technology incorporates a computer vision approach supported by machine learning (ML) models. The avian monitoring technology will improve the ability to collect a large volume of avian-solar interactions data to better understand potential avian impacts associated with solar energy facilities.
How Does the Technology Work?
Our technology uses a 4-step approach to generate avian-solar interactions data from videos.
- Detect moving objects: a background subtraction algorithm (i.e., Gaussian Mixture Model) detects moving objects and creates a sequence of image subsets known as tracks.
- Differentiate birds from other objects: a multiple instance learning model with the entire sequence of image subsets classifies moving objects into birds and non-bird objects.
- Detect collisions: a hybrid ML model determines if a bird collided with facility infrastructure.
- Classify non-collision activities: a Fusion bidirectional Long Short-Team Memory model classifies bird activities in 5 categories—fly over above, fly through, perch on panel, land on ground, and perch in background.
Types of Bird Activities
Our current technology is capable of extracting five bird activities: (1) perch on panel, (2) fly through between panels, (3) fly over panels, (4) land on ground, and (5) collide with panel. Extracted data contain details of bird behavior helpful in understanding bird site use and species diversity.