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FWS HQ MB Proposed Eagle Incidental Take Permit Eligibility Zones for Wind

Metadata Updated: October 28, 2023

Under proposed Alternatives 3 and 4 in the draft Environmental Assessment for the proposed rule (Permits for Incidental Take of Eagles and Eagle Nests), wind facilities would be eligible for a general permit or a specific permit based, in part, on eagle abundance data. This map of the coterminous U.S. shows where projects would be eligible to self-certify for a general permit if they meet all of the criteria, or apply for a specific permit. Existing projects that are only eligible for specific permits may be determined to qualify for a general permit upon Service review of their permit application. See the Federal Register Notice for information about submitting comments on the proposed rule and draft environmental review.

Permit eligibility zones are based on eBird relative abundance estimates for bald eagles and golden eagles throughout the coterminous United States at 8 km2 resolution for each of five periods (breeding, fall, migration, spring, winter). Using multiple seasons of data provides better measures of relative abundance for mapping purposes (Johnston et al. 2020), and our goal was to identify locations with high relative abundance of eagles in any one season.

For each eagle species we evaluated non-zero relative abundance data for each season using custom R scripts in Program R (R Core Team 2021). We identified cells that had relative abundance values in each season that were at or above the relevant quantile threshold value. We combined these species-specific, seasonal layers into a single layer that indicates cells that did not exceed the relative abundance thresholds in any season and cells that exceeded one or more threshold. We then created maps of the permit eligibility zones (i.e., grid cells that did not exceed the relative abundance threshold in any season) for several scenarios for each eagle species. This map includes a combined proposed general permit zone consisting of areas where golden eagle abundance is 50% or less than golden eagle abundance elsewhere in the lower 48 states within each season and bald eagle abundance is 95% or less than it is elsewhere in the lower 48 states in each season.

This raster layer uses an equal-area sinusoidal projection that is used by eBird status and trend products, including relative abundance data (this projection is also used for NASA MODIS data). Note: We advise that users reproject any layers they wish to conduct spatial overlay analyses with into the same sinusoidal projection as this layer to ensure the most accurate geospatial representation of the data. Cell values of 0 indicates cells where a wind project may be eligible for self-certified general permit if other qualification criteria are met under the proposed regulation. Cell values of 1 indicates cells where a wind project would be eligible for a simplified specific permit.

Additional technical details about map development can be found in Appendix A of the draft Environmental Assessment for the Proposed Eagle Incidental Take Rule revision.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

References

https://ecos.fws.gov/ServCat/Reference/Profile/148928

Dates

Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date October 28, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date October 28, 2023
Publisher U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/189506353bb3312ee00328dcdeb13ebd
Identifier FWS_ServCat_148928
Data First Published 2022-09-01T12:00:00Z
Data Last Modified 2022-09-01
Category Raster Dataset
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:18
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Data Quality True
Harvest Object Id 7535f79d-e612-4876-8a3a-45f717a30f2b
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Homepage URL https://ecos.fws.gov/ServCat/Reference/Profile/148928
Program Code 010:028, 010:094
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Related Documents https://ecos.fws.gov/ServCat/Reference/Profile/148928
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 3273ff7691cb7d3e7a1150dfa95a829fd7bab115be0b4d70c7784d3a644ee1e3
Source Schema Version 1.1
Temporal 2022-09-01T12:00:00Z/2022-12-01T12:00:00Z

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