Ecological monitoring is carried out on solar farms either as a requisite for planning or so that asset owners can keep track of the development of habitats on their sites and detect issues early on. To date, large amounts of monitoring data has been collected, but in a variety of ways. This means that solar site ecological information is not comparative and there is a wide variety of approaches to monitoring.
Clarkson and Woods along with Wychwood Biodiversity and Solar Energy UK developed a Standardised Approach to Monitoring Biodiversity on Solar Farms, which can be downloaded here: https://solarenergyuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Ecological-Monitoring-Guidance-2022.pdf. Our hope is that this standard will be adopted by other ecological consultants with data uploaded to Solar Energy UK for analysis, so that we can get a stronger evidence base in terms of how solar farms affect local wildlife.
The methodology is a work in progress, so we are hoping that other consultancies or interested parties will get in touch with feedback so that we can continue to develop the standardised approach to ecological monitoring.