Factors affecting carcass detection at wind farms using dogs and human searchers

The use of detection dogs to effectively monitor bird and bat fatalities at wind farms is becoming increasingly popular. All studies to date agree that dogs outperform human searchers at finding bird and bat carcasses around wind turbines; however, it remains unclear how characteristics of the carcass and environmental conditions during the search may influence detection. We investigate the effect of carcass size, vegetation characteristics and weather conditions on the probability of detecting a carcass, for both dogs and humans, using data from the monitoring program of a wind farm in Spain. A generalized linear mixed model reveals a high performance of dogs (~80% detection rate), with no clear influence of any of the variables analysed. Humans, on the contrary, were markedly affected by the size of the carcass and to some extent, by the vegetation structure. Humans performed poorly at detecting small carcasses (~20% detection rate), more so in closed vegetation. Synthesis and applications. Our results provide evidence that dogs perform with high success rates at detecting bird and bat carcasses of different sizes under a wide range of environmental conditions. Humans, by contrast, were very poor at detecting all but the largest carcasses in open areas. We find the use of detection dogs at wind farms to be a robust and cost‐effective alternative to using human searchers, most notably, when the focus is on the monitoring of fatalities of small, rare or inconspicuous species in closed vegetation. Resumen El interés por el uso de perros adiestrados para el control de la mortalidad de aves y murciélagos en parques eólicos se ha incrementado en los últimos tiempos. Y aunque los perros han obtenido rendimientos superiores a los humanos en todos los ensayos realizados, aún quedan por aclarar cuestiones sobre la influencia de las características de los restos o las condiciones ambientales en la capacidad de detección. Analizamos la influencia del tamaño de los restos, las características de la vegetación y las condiciones meteorológicas en la capacidad de detección de perros y humanos, a través de los datos recogidos en un programa de control ambiental de un parque eólico en España. Utilizando un modelo general lineal mixto mostramos que los perros mantienen un alto rendimiento independientemente de la influencia de las variables analizadas (índice de detección ~80%). En cambio, los buscadores humanos se ven marcadamente afectados por el tamaño del cadáver y, en