Finding the Balance: Safeguarding Wildlife Through Dark Sky Conservation
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Light Monitoring
Wildlife respond to artificial light in a multitude of ways. It’s imporant to select the most appropriate technology and methods to best suit the receptors relevant to your project.
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Light Modelling
Predicting project-related light emissions helps us understand how wildlife will perceive light and assess potential impacts in advance, allowing management to begin during the design phase.
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Approvals
We can undertake desktop assessments and develop Artificial Light Management Plans to suit sensitive receptors within your project area, consistent with the Light Pollution Guidelines and any approval conditions.
Light Monitoring
All-Sky Brightness
Our All-Sky cameras measure the brightness of the night sky in a full 360° hemisphere above the monitoring location, allowing us to understand the visibility of light at sensitive habitat. Quantitative results identify the intensity and bearing of light sources and allow us to detect differences over time and link these changes to wildlife behaviour.
Realtime Sensors
Our Zenith Brightness sensors capture sky brightness directly overhead their deployment location every five minutes, transmitting the data to the cloud immediately. This allows assessment of lighting changes in realtime, as well as providing a large dataset for long-term trend analysis. They are fully weatherproof and operate on a small battery charged entirely from solar power, allowing them to be installed continuously in remote locations.
Inspections and Audits
We can audit your project lighting against approval conditions, a Basis of Design or other requirements, and provide recommendations on how to manage any problem lighting. We can assess various lighting parameters including illumination levels, spectral output, and ULR.
Sky Glow Spectroscopy
Understanding the spectral makeup of sky glow can be difficult with conventional monitoring equipment. Our long-range spectrometer can determine the cumulative lighting makeup of sky glow at a point in time from long distances away (up to 100 km). Repeated measurements over time can show how changes in lighting at a facility are contributing to the overall spectral output of a region.
Light Modelling
Simulating predicted light emissions early in the design phase allows us to understand potential impacts on wildlife and develop management measures prior to construction, preventing costly retrofits during operations. Using the open-source ILLUMINA model, we can integrate baseline light monitoring data and separate out the contribution from your project from other light sources already present. We can also undertake simplified line-of-sight or viewshed analyses when appropriate.
Approvals
We can develop an Artificial Light Management Plan (ALMP) that adheres to the approach outlined in the National Light Pollution Guidelines for Wildlife and the EPA guidance, in additional to any local planning regulations such as the QLD Sea Turtle Sensitive Area Code. This includes undertaking desktop assessments to identify sensitive receptors within the vicinity of your project, impact assessments, and developing objective and/or outcome-based criteria to ensure impacts of artificial light on wildlife are mitigated and appropriate management actions are implemented effectively.