Renewabpacts on bats and raptors are well-studied, effects on elusive species remain largely unknown. The European Woodcock (Scolopax rusticola), a nocturnal forest bird, performs roding flights at twilight to mark territories and attract mates. Despite evidence suggesting potential impacts on the species, details regarding the effects of wind energy use in forests on the habitat use of Woodcocks remain unclear. We compared the vocal activity of Woodcocks at 15 windfarms scattered throughout central Germany. We used passive acoustic monitoring in a paired design, with control sites, situated ≥3 km from wind turbines. We took recordings for three hours at dawn and dusk over ten days in June 2023—during peak roding season. We validated presumed Woodcock matches by BirdNET to assess precision for the species accompanied by a stratified screening to estimate recall rates. We compared true vs. false positive BirdNET hits in relation to the twilight periods during dawn and dusk respectively. Further, we compared the presence of Woodcocks as well as their continuity throughout the recording period, separately for dusk and dawn. We found that the Woodcocks’ roding activity was confined by darkness and by the vocal activity of other species (mainly Thrushes), which during the morning/evening chorus partially overlapped with the acoustic niche of the Woodcocks. Detection probabilities of BirdNET were not affected by differences in soundscapes with and without windfarm instalments. Likewise, species’ presence did not change between windfarm and control sites. However, we found that roding activity of Woodcocks was significantly reduced at wind power sites by around 59% (95%CI = 40%-75%). We discuss our findings with regards to environmental management of the species for windpower planning, including the use of passive acoustic monitoring for elusive species.

Enabled by rapid advances in sequencing technologies, population genetics currently experiences a second boom. Established approaches are being adapted to new marker systems, and new methods are developed that allow genome-wide estimates of the four major micro-evolutionary forces – mutation, gene flow, genetic drift and selection. Nevertheless, classic population genetic markers are still commonly used and a plethora of analysis methods and programs are available. With these diverse ranges of datasets and methods, various theoretical and statistical frameworks are employed to varying degrees of success in estimating similar evolutionary parameters making it difficult to get a concise overview across the available approaches. Presently, reviews on this topic generally focus on a particular class of methods to estimate one or two evolutionary parameters. Here, we provide a brief history of methods and a comprehensive list of available programs for estimating micro-evolutionary forces. We furthermore analysed their usage within the research community based on popularity (citation bias) and discuss the implications of this bias on the software community. We found that a few programs received the majority of citations, with program success being independent of both the parameters estimated and the computing platform. The only deviation from a model of exponential growth in the number of citations was found for the presence of a graphical user interface (GUI). Hence, developers should consider implementing GUIs in their programs in order to promote them.