Date: Wednesday 29th January
Time: TBC
Speaker: Alona Armstrong/Piran White
Solar parks offer an opportunity to help restore ecosystems, as well as providing low carbon energy, but how can we capitalise on the potential to maximise ecosystem gains from solar parks? This webinar will focus on SPIES (Solar Parks and Impacts on Ecosystem Services), a decision support tool that can be used to inform solar park management for environmental co-benefits. SPIES has been co-developed by a cross-sectoral project partner team including Lancaster University, the University of York, the solar industry, the farming community and nature conservation bodies and is underpinned by over 700 pieces of evidence from more than 450 peer-reviewed journal articles, ensuring applicability and a robust evidence base on which to base
Date: Wednesday 12th March
Time: TBC
Speaker: Hollie Blaydes
Many pollinator groups have suffered population declines driven by large scale habitat loss and degradation, but creating new habitats within solar farms could be an effective mitigation strategy. There is growing understanding of pollinator response to solar farms and this webinar will explore how these sites can be managed to promote pollinators, based on research from Lancaster University and the University of Reading. Ten evidence-based management recommendations to support and enhance pollinator biodiversity on solar farms will be exploring, before discussing how these interventions may affect pollinators using knowledge from field- and modelling-based studies.
Date: TBC
Time: TBC
Speaker: Harvie Agnew / Hannah Montag / Guy Parker
Ecological monitoring of solar farms is important for assessing change, identifying management issues and ensuring planning obligations are met. The data collected can also be used to evaluate biodiversity response to solar farms and if shared, can be amalgamated and analysed to gain a better understanding of solar farm biodiversity at the national level. However, ecological monitoring approaches vary and this makes it challenging to pool data from different sites. In response, Solar Energy UK, Clarkson & Woods, Wychwood Biodiversity and Lancaster University have devised a standardised monitoring approach and this webinar will explore how the protocol can be used to ensure asset owners obtain the same standard of information across solar farms and how this can feed into increasing understanding of ecological impacts of these
