Mission: Share information about avian collision risk models (CRMs) and identify key avenues for continued improvements in CRM structure and application in terrestrial and marine contexts worldwide.
The International Collision Risk Modeling (CRM) Working Group was formed at the Conference on Wind Energy and Wildlife Impacts (CWW) in 2023 in Šibenik, Croatia. The group’s goal is to bring together developers and users of avian CRMs to share information and identify key avenues for continued improvements in CRM structure and application in both terrestrial and marine contexts. Working group members include scientists, regulators, resource managers, wind energy developers, and environmental consultants.
Image credit: Pam Loring
The group meets approximately yearly and discusses topics such as: differences between CRMs currently in use around the world; challenges with integrating different avian data types into models; improving frameworks for estimating cumulative impacts with CRMs; and scientific priorities for making CRMs more useful and broadly applicable. An archive of materials from past meetings is available here.
The most recent meeting of the working group occurred in conjunction with the September 2025 CWW conference in Montpellier, France (https://www.cww2025.org/programme/workshops). Current activities include:
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Developing deployment guidance for tracking devices on focal species (e.g., when, where, and how many tags should be deployed on each species to adequately sample the population of interest). In the United States, this guidance will be developed in collaboration with the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative (RWSC).
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Developing a database of wind turbine models and input parameters (e.g., tidal offsets as detailed in Band 2012, turbine characteristics, etc.) to inform collision risk modeling globally.
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Consideration of approaches for using CRMs to help assess potential cumulative impacts from offshore wind energy development.
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Developing a recommended approach for rolling out CRM updates (e.g., to provide comfort to regulators as models are updated in response to new datasets and improvements in our understanding of collision risk).
The next in-person meeting of the working group is expected to occur in the summer of 2026. Enter your information below to subscribe to the working group mailing list.
CRM Working Group Leadership
Evan Adams co-directs the Quantitative Wildlife Ecology Research Lab (QWERL) at the Biodiversity Research Institute and is a co-PI on the SCRAM project. His work focuses on animal distributions and movements and their responses to environmental change.
Grant Humphries is a quantitative marine ecologist and the Director of Black Bawks Data Science Ltd. based in Scotland. He is one of the maintainers of the stochLAB collision risk model R package and developed the migratory collision risk model tool (mCRM).
Aonghais Cook is a Principal Consultant at The Biodiversity Consultancy whose work investigates the impacts of renewable energy on biodiversity, especially the interactions between seabirds and offshore wind farms around the world.
Kate Williams is the Director of the Center for Research on Offshore Wind and the Environment at the Biodiversity Research Institute. She is a co-PI on SCRAM and leads a range of other projects focused on understanding and minimizing effects of offshore wind energy on wildlife.
Holly Goyert is a Senior Quantitative Ecologist at the Biodiversity Research Institute focused primarily on updating the Motus movement models for SCRAM. Holly speaks fluent Spanish and has both lived and worked in various locales throughout North and South America.