  Animal-related outages (AROs) are a prevalent form of outages in electrical
distribution systems. Animal-infrastructure interactions vary across focal
species and regions, underlining the need to study the animal-outage
relationship in more species and diverse systems. Animal activity has been used
as an indicator of reliability in the electrical grid system and to describe
temporal patterns in AROs. However, these ARO models have been limited by a
lack of available estimates of species activity, instead approximating activity
based on seasonal and weather patterns in animal-related outage records and
characteristics of broad taxonomic groups, e.g., squirrels. We highlight
publicly available resources to fill the ecological data gap that is limiting
joint analyses between ecology and energy sectors. Species distribution models
(SDMs), a common technique to model the distribution of a species across
geographic space and time, paired with data sourced from eBird, a community
science database for bird observations, provided us with species-specific
estimates of activity to model spatio-temporal patterns of AROs. These
flexible, species-specific estimates can allow future animal-indicators of grid
reliability to be investigated in more diverse regions and ecological
communities, providing a better understanding of the variation that exists in
animal-outage relationship. AROs were best modeled by accounting for multiple
outage-prone species activity patterns and their unique relationships with
seasonality and habitat availability. Different species were important for
modeling outages in different landscapes and seasons depending on their
distribution and migration behavior. We recommend that future models of AROs
include species-specific activity data that account for the diverse spectrum of
spatio-temporal activity patterns that outage-prone animals exhibit.
