The Opportunity

Renewable energy holds promise for the future, potentially contributing to sharp declines in the carbon emitted from burning fossil fuels and modulating climate change. But converting a large amount of land to build renewable energy facilities could come with drawbacks, including habitat loss or degradation for the wildlife that use these areas. Meanwhile, renewable energy could benefit wildlife through sound management practice, but such benefits are not well demonstrated.

The energy industry and regulatory agencies need to consider both positive and negative effects when selecting the locations of future renewable energy facilities.

Argonne’s Response

Argonne is developing a web-based tool that estimates the cumulative effects of future energy development on critical wildlife species by leveraging Argonne’s unique expertise in:

• Ecological agent-based modeling (ABM) framework development
• ABM and simulation combined with machine learning (ML)
• High-performance computing (HCP)
• High-resolution climate projection
• In-depth knowledge of ecological barriers to utility-scale renewable energy development

Argonne pioneered the use of ABMs — which incorporate the movement and interaction of millions of individual agents with one another and with their environment — and has used them in applications ranging from traffic and disease spread to military supply chains.

Using this modeling framework, combined with ecology, climate projection, ML, and HPC, users can analyze wildlife responses to energy facilities over multiple years before development, revolutionizing how energy facility siting could harmonize development and wildlife conservation.

Benefits

• Examine wildlife species responses to development over time under climate change at the planning stage
• Gain insights for mitigation opportunities from type, area, and timing of wildlife responses
• Explore development options by testing mitigation plans and management practices in the model
• Complement existing, static map-based information with information on animal behavior
• Streamline the current assessment workflow into an easy-to-use web-based tool