Mapping European Blanket Bog Windfarms

Google Earth Pro was used to manually digitise current windfarm developments across European blanket bogs. All vector layers obtained from the official government websites were imported into Google Earth Pro and each blanket bog was assessed individually. Individual wind turbines, track length and total area with evidence of windfarm development were digitised using the most recent imagery available at the maximum scale possible to define all the visible infrastructures at the best resolution possible. A file with the current aerial imagery year has been provided in additional materials. All turbines were digitised using a point shapefile, tracks using a polyline shapefile and affected area using a polygon shapefile in ArcGIS 10.8.1 (Fig. 6). All files were exported in .kml format and imported into ArcGIS 10.8.1 for further analysis (Fig. 6). All vector files were managed by country to respect the coordinate systems and geographical projections for each individual region in the analysis.Figure 6

Flowchart of spatial analyses undertook in this research to obtain the final products using ArcGIS 10.8.1 and QGIS.