Increasing numbers of wind power plants (WPP) are constructed across the globe to reduce the anthropogenic contribution to global warming. There are, however, concerns on the effects of WPP on human health as well as related effects on wildlife. To address potential effects of WPP in environmental impact assessments, existing models accounting for shadow flickering and noise are widely applied. However, a standardized, yet simple and widely applicable proxy for the visibility of rotating wind turbines in woodland areas was largely lacking up to date. We combined land cover information of forest canopy extracted from orthophotos and airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data to represent the visibility of rotating wind turbines in five woodland study sites with a high spatial resolution. Performing an in-situ validation in five study areas across Europe which resulted in a unique sample of 1738 independent field observations, we show that our approach adequately predicts from where rotating wind turbine blades are visible within woodlands or not. We thus provide strong evidence, that our approach yields a valuable proxy of the visibility of moving rotor blades with high resolution which in turn can be applied in environmental impact assessments of WPP within woodlands worldwide.

在全球范围内，越来越多的风力发电厂（WPP）建成，以减少人为因素对全球变暖的影响。但是，人们关注WPP对人类健康的影响以及对野生动植物的相关影响。为了解决WPP在环境影响评估中的潜在影响，广泛应用了解决阴影闪烁和噪声的现有模型。然而，迄今为止，在林地地区仍然缺乏标准化的，但简单且可广泛应用的替代方案来代替旋转式风力发电机的可视性。我们结合了从正射影像中提取的林冠的土地覆盖信息和机载激光扫描（LiDAR）数据，以代表五个具有高空间分辨率的林地研究站点中旋转的风力涡轮机的能见度。在整个欧洲的五个研究区域进行了现场验证，得出了1738个独立现场观测的独特样本，我们证明了我们的方法可以充分预测林地内是否可见旋转的风力涡轮机叶片。因此，我们提供了有力的证据，表明我们的方法可以很好地反映出动叶片的可视性，具有很高的分辨率，进而可以将其应用于全球林地内WPP的环境影响评估中。