A watershed WEST project was the comprehensive wildlife studies for the Foote Creek Rim wind project in southeast Wyoming. Foote Creek Rim was WEST’s first wind project and fit well with Dale and Lyman’s vision for the company: combining statistics and field ecology. Beginning in 1994, WEST became involved in the project through review of the field studies and analyses conducted by another third party consultant for the Bureau of Land Management. Foote Creek Rim, one of the first large scale wind projects using modern technology built outside California, was located in part on public land, and had challenging detection, prediction and estimation problems for a variety of wildlife species, and it had other scientific challenges that could be best addressed by combining statistics and ecology. The project fit well with their experience and WEST’s corporate mission, and given our expertise in these areas WEST was able to secure contracts for the baseline pre-construction studies through the post-construction monitoring studies of the project from 1995-2001. To date, WEST has worked on more than 1800 renewable energy studies across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. #WEST30Years
