First Wind Maui Seabird Population Modeling

Project Summary

First Wind Energy, LLC required a seabird conservation program under its Habitat Conservation Plans to mitigate impacts on the endangered Hawaiian petrel and threatened Newell’s shearwater across three wind energy projects on Maui.

Location: Maui, Hawaii

Challenge

Three wind energy projects required a mitigation site to offset authorized take of endangered seabirds, with the program needing to demonstrate chick production and adult survival well above baseline levels over the 20-year term of the wind project permits. This was a difficult outcome to model and quantify, made harder by predation from introduced species threatening colony survival without intervention.

Our Role

Integral staff, including globally recognized experts on the species involved, developed a deterministic population dynamics model evaluating the effects of predation and predator control on Hawaiian petrels and Newell’s shearwaters. The model compared baseline conditions against three separate mitigation scenarios to project the net recovery benefit for each species, and determined that without mitigation, the seabird colony would likely decline rapidly absent substantial immigration.

What We Delivered & Results

The models showed that effective predator control paired with social attraction would allow populations to increase, informing the design of the Makamaka’ole mitigation site, which now includes predator-resistant fencing to exclude dogs, mongooses, feral cats, and rats, artificial nest burrows, and conditions established to support social attraction of breeding seabirds.