Novel low-cost methods for marine mammal and environmental monitoring

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The UK is rapidly entering a phase where the majority of its energy comes from renewable resources. However, tomaintain this push towards green energy providers will need to find more sites to generate power. In recent years therehave been moves towards using offshore wind generation instead of onshore wind farms. Whilst offshore wind has manyadvantages there is potential impact on marine wildlife that needs to be considered. New applications for offshore windfarmsites require a thorough Environmental Impact Assessment and the offshore environment makes it hard to accuratelyassess current marine populations, making this a time-consuming and costly operation.In this research we propose to develop a real-time acoustic monitoring platform that will enable operators to assess a sitefor marine mammal activity at a fraction of the current cost and effort and moreover, produce better and more accurateresults. This will be done by deploying large numbers of novel low cost, low power underwater wireless sensor devices(NanoPAMs) which detect the sounds that marine mammals make to navigate, hunt and communicate. The data from eachNanoPAM is transmitted using acoustic signals over distances up to 10 km to a surface buoy. Since the animals may beable to hear these acoustic signals, the NanoPAMs transmit very low energy acoustic signals which blend into thebackground noise and are also smart enough to wait until animals have left the area before transmitting so as not toinfluence behaviour. The surface buoy then uses radio to send the received data back to shore where it can be visualisedand analysed.On shore, the data collected can be turned into an understanding of the current activity of marine mammals and also tomonitor the ongoing impact of offshore windfarm developments. In future, the system could be rapidly deployed in multiplelocations to help select sites that would minimise the impact on our marine wildlife.