(CN) — Once roaming throughout the southeastern United States, the remaining population of the Florida panther is now confined to a single area of South Florida that represents just 5% of its historic range.
That limited range is being threatened by the rapid expansion of profit-yielding, utility-scale solar energy facilities that are being installed to combat carbon emissions, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
“Our study suggests that in the drive to shift our energy production to carbon neutral sources, while maintaining maximum profitability, wildlife outside human dominated landscapes with large ranges and dispersal potentials may be pushed into less favorable habitat or cut off completely from available habitat by degradation of corridors,” said senior author Olena Leskova, a PhD student at Florida Atlantic University and a geographer/geospatial scientist at the South Florida Water Management District, in a statement.
Florida panthers need large ranges they can venture across. For males, that’s about 200 square miles of protected areas in wildlife corridors. Their survival relies on their ability to travel back and forth in this space.
Utility-scale solar energy plants, or USSE facilities, which are on the next frontier of clean energy in the push to combat the expansion of fossil fuel extraction, also require large swaths of acreage that tends to be in wildlife areas.
Wednesday's study is the first to document the effect of USSE facilities on both habitat sustainability for large carnivores and the broad-scale connectivity of suitable habitat. Conducted by researchers at FAU, the study asks whether the benefit of clean energy through solar installations can be balanced with preserving local wildlife.
To date, 27,688 acres of land in South Florida have been cleared and replaced with 45 solar facilities that were included in the study.
Researchers found that USSE facilities were most frequently installed on grasslands and pastures, which represent 45.7% of the total area replaced by solar facilities, and agricultural lands, which account for 34.9%. Forest was the third most impacted land, representing 13.2% of land taken for USSE plants.
Habitat loss and fragmentation are widely considered the primary threats to the Florida panther. Its survival depends on access to a variety of habitats, including grasslands, forests, and swamps.
The study found “a substantial bias in locating USSE facilities within rural and undeveloped lands, which may provide connectivity that is sufficient for Florida panthers to roam, live and breed,” according to a press release announcing the results.
But of the 45 solar sites studied, just six were found to have no to very minimal expected impact on panther habitat.
Most of the facilities are surrounded by 6-foot, chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. The ecological costs of fencing to wildlife, according to the researchers, include disrupting their migration routes, dividing their habitats, restricting their range and evolutionary potential, and directly or indirectly causing their injury or death.
Scott Markwith, a co-author on the study and a geosciences professor at FAU, said in a statement that implementing regulations focused on preserving wildlife corridors could prevent future harm to panthers. He also stressed that restoration of natural corridors for wildlife is imperative.
“Formally protecting and enhancing the remaining corridors between core areas at the landscape-scale will potentially ameliorate, or mitigate, the impacts already evident after installation of some facilities, and may prevent foreseeable impacts with additional planned facilities,” Markwith said.
He added, “Restoring dispersal corridors and gene flow throughout Peninsular Florida is critical to the Florida panther, its prey, and ancillary species that benefit from a connected Florida ecosystem. This, in turn, will benefit biodiversity and species resiliency at the landscape-scale."
Solar capacity in Florida is forecasted to expand exponentially over the next decade, from 1,743 to 12,537 megawatts, with major electric companies planning substantial expansions.
The 12,537 megawatts of solar energy predicted to come from the state's USSE facilities should be enough to power 2.4 million homes, Leskova said in an email.
Researchers found that USSE facilities installed in clusters may create greater connectivity disruptions than single facilities, especially when installed in nearly a continuous barrier alongside the corridor.
This practice of clustering facilities is used by energy companies because it means fewer roads and other supportive infrastructure and makes maintenance easier.
How future USSE facilities are built will have huge impacts on endangered and protected wildlife species in Florida that require large diverse spaces to survive, such as gopher tortoises, eastern indigo snakes, Florida scrub jay, Florida burrowing owls and Florida black bears.
“Research involving additional impacted species will also fill gaps in environmental protection policy concerning both local and regional scale implications of utility-scale solar energy facilities,” Markwith said.
Robert Frakes, an ecologist specializing in panther habitat modeling and conservation, also co-authored the study.
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